Iquitos in Peru - a city you can never reach by car!

Mr Albert Glynne Howell, a rather portly Anglo Indian gentleman with perfect diction and a great love for his subject, used to be our Geography teacher in school in Bombay. It is since those days that I recall the Amazon, Iquitos, Igassu Falls and various aspects of the South American continent. It was a fairy tale world which one dreamt about and then, as luck would have it, I studied the Amazon tribes in greater detail for my Social Anthropology Tripos at Cambridge. I have always been fascinated by this area and here I was in 2015 actually living my dream.  

Iquitos is unique in that it is the only city in the world where one cannot drive into the city – you arrive / leave either by air or by sea. Strange when you think of it – but once there, you don’t feel isolated as the sea lanes are thriving and business is brisk. What is really unusual is that the jungle is right outside the city – it is there behind you, in front of you and all around you. There is a lot of greenery all around you.

Iquitos airport is spanking new and very clean. It’s got separate arrival and departure areas with a few shops selling foodstuff and local artefacts. There are a few porters too to help you with your baggage. We arrived into Iquitos by mid morning after a brief halt at Pucallpa, near Yarinacocha. It was a gloomy cloudy day and sure enough, it started drizzling as we left the Manatee Centre (see separate blog on this) for the city – the airport is seven kms away from the centre. The countryside  features  were so familiar to me as they resemble those of my country India -  the single lane roads with many banana and coconut trees by the roadside and the general traffic consisted of tuk-tuks or what we call rickshaws (motorised tricycles with sitting or luggage areas at the back).

The buildings were a mish mash in that after seeing a series of mud or aluminium panel huts one gradually found the city’s buildings were one or more storeys high, often in poor state of maintenance. Poverty was prevalent everywhere.

The central square reminds one of old movies where one saw drug lords and the police having a shootout on horseback ! Its rather an anomaly, as on one side is a very fancy 5 star hotel (cheapest room US$ 249 per night /suite for US$ 1,000 – no meals included - imagine in a small town like Iquitos!!) and right at the other corner of the Plaza de Armas is a steel structure called the “Casa de Fierro” or Iron Building - Gustave Eiffel built it in Paris in 1860 and it was brought here in 1890, erected piece by piece. At one time it must have been rather imposing but now it has some cheap restaurants and chemist shops.

The river teems with life – there are huge steamers as ferries which transport goods and humans on deck or with basic accommodation. A hammock is de rigueur if travelling for a few hours on a ferry. There are many tugboats and old ships along the coast line.  In theory, one can go travel up to the Atlantic Ocean but most boats are only in Peruvian waters. For long distance travel, one needs to change ships at the borders. There are two ports – where you get transport on all sorts of boats.

Like Goa, in India, the whole atmosphere reeks of “What’s the hurry?”  - People laze around, gossiping and relaxing. There is no real rush visible except near the large market place which has a huge banana and fish market in the suburb of Belen. Lots of people buying and selling these and other items. We saw piranhas which were really large – around 12” long as compared to the 3” ones which we had caught in the trip.  There is also apparently a floating shanty town here but we did not see it.

By the Cafe Fitzcarraldo, on the river are various huts which can be rented out to stay. Tour operators, of dubious repute, have their offices in small shacks nearby. What intrigued me was the presence of what the Kashmiris, of northern India, call ‘shikaras’ – long covered boats which glide along the water, taking tourists or locals. They are also used for transporting vegetables or flowers. Here in Iquitos, there were 7 or 8 of them under the shade of a tree awaiting customers for a boat ride. Our stop was only for 45 minutes so we did not have time except for a quick walk around the square.

Due to the rubber boom of the late 1880’s onwards for a few decades, Iquitos had many beautiful mansions with exquisite tiles and wide roads built. 

One building which i really liked was built from 1908-1912 and it stands right by the riverfront. Its a two storey structure with stunning ‘azulejos’ or tile work imported from Portugal having beautiful designs. I tried to enter but found it locked.

There is a cafe bar called Fitzcarraldo – near the river - a tribute to the 1982 film directed by Werner Herzog starring Klaus Kinski. It’s a real memory lane here with posters, photographs and other items, like the ship’s wheel and figurehead, all featuring the movie shot in Iquitos. It’s a film based on the life of the rubber baron Carlos Fermin Fitzcarrald – his adventures and life in the X1Xth century feature in a book called “Fitzcarrald – Pioneer and Predator of the Amazon”. This film had an intriguing history with violent fights and wars taking place during its shooting! Worth reading up on that.

On the way in, we stopped at the port to take the skiff to board our ship M V Amatista... our guide ensured that we all wore safety vests and sat comfortably in the 25 seater skiff. The luggage was brought to the ship in another skiff piloted by the Captain’s 3^rd son who was also our boatman. It was our very first effort in getting into the skiff – a routine which we were to repeat many a time during the next seven days whilst we were on the M V Amatista and the Amazon’s Maranon and Ucayali rivers.

When one leaves Iquitos, and I was lucky in that I got a window seat, one realizes the immense width and size of the river. From a distance of say 20,000 ft, the river still appears vast and the islands are definitely miles wide. The Amazon will always remain an enigma – and one hopes the rain forest will survive the machinations of Man and his greed. I will hopefully return one day and travel down another path of the upper Amazon towards northern Peru.

so enjoy these scenes of the amazon taken from the airplane on our way back to Lima.

 a view of the forest surrounded by the river Amazon 

Just see the majesty of the Andean range , all bleak and brown, with a few snow topped peaks.

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