Living in Peru : your everyday companion

By John Meils

Of all the cargo on the boat from Yurimaguas to Iquitos, the least important was us. This fact began to reveal itself the moment we arrived at la boca, the port in Yurimaguas. Everyone was in a rush, moving goods, livestock and themselves in a frantic dance towards the water, which was blocked from view by a domino line of trailers perched atop a hill. As I tried to catch a glimpse through them, the dirt road into the port pinched to an end next to a string of wood-plank buildings on stilts, depositing us into the chaos.


We were immediately surrounded as we stepped from our moto-taxi. “Quieren Eduardo?” they all asked. Eduardo is the name of the most popular — and seemingly only — line of lanchas, or cargo boats, that make the river trip from Yurimaguas to Iquitos. Later I’d realize why it all felt so urgent: we were errant cargo in a bustling port; we needed to be properly assigned and stowed to keep order. I asked to see the boat(s) and was near dragged through the mayhem — amidst the trailers and then down a dirt slope strewn with 50-kilo bags of rice and maize, small herds of cows and stacks of lumber. There were dock workers swarming all around, moving everything on or off the barges parked nose-in where the mud met the water.

Travel to Iquitos in a boat

Along with Pucallpa, Yurimaguas is a feeder port for Iquitos, the largest jungle-locked city in the world. Which means there are only two ways to supply the latter’s half million residents. One of them — hint, lanchas — is radically cheaper than air transport. This is important to know if you’re traveling via lancha, because their priority is not you. Their business revolves around their other cargo. That’s what allows you to travel so cheaply in the breezy space above it.

From Yurimaguas, the trip to Iquitos begins on the Haullaga River, which connects with the Marañón, which in turn joins with the Ucayali River (from Pucallpa). The Marañón skirts along the edge of the Pacaya Samiria Reserve, one of the more untouched swaths of jungle left in Peru. (Intrepid travelers can get off the boat along the way in a town called Lagunas, where it’s possible to find guides who will take you into the reserve.) Farther up the river, just after the city of Nauta, the Marañón and Ucayali join forces to form the Amazon proper, flowing from there to Iquitos, into Brazil and eventually out to the Atlantic Ocean.

I was traveling with an Aussie who I met in Tarapoto. The two of us were hustled onto the top deck of the “Eduardo VI” — one of two Eduardo boats in port. The price was 60 soles for the entire trip, a 40-hour journey. This included three meals a day on one of two giant shared decks where we could sling a hammock. Private cabinas were also available, albeit at 250 soles per bed. We opted for the open-air accommodations. There were two of us, which would make it easier to keep an eye on each other’s stuff, trade travel stories, pass the time.

And we’d have lots of it, as it turned out. The boat wasn’t scheduled to leave until the next morning, though we were free to sleep on deck if we wanted. After procuring some supplies in town — water, a hammock, a fork and bowl for the meals served on the boat — we settled in for the night. Despite the sweltering, airless day, it actually got chilly after dark and I slept fitfully. At 4:30 a.m., a rooster began cawing furiously a few meters from my head. More passengers had come aboard as we slept and set up next to us — with their livestock. At 5:30 a.m., with the roosters still wailing away, everyone began taking down their hammocks and scrambling to the other Eduardo boat — the “Gilmer IV” — parked next to ours. Suddenly, there seemed to be a lot more people on board, and all of them — and now, us — were jockeying for a good spot on the new boat.

Shredding chicken for dinner.

A typical meal on board.

You and the Cargo

After we secured our digs, we watched as they loaded the Gilmer IV with cargo. Or rather, unload it then re-stock it with fresh cargo. The process was mesmerizing. Because the river rises and falls so precipitously, there is no formal dock at Yurimaguas. The port is simply a muddy slope at the edge of town. Large planks bridged the gap between land and water for the army of dock workers hefting sacks of rice and maize and depositing them onto the lower deck. After the dry goods came the cattle — a haphazard collection of cows, big and small, ornery and docile, herded roughly into a makeshift pen on the front deck. In all, it took about five hours.

I killed time by watching the rhythm of the port — the fathers bringing their kids to school in dugout canoes from upriver, a pair of pink dolphins frolicking in the water around the boats, the families on deck settling in for what looked like a long trip. We pushed off around noon, a full day after we arrived. Three hours later, after scrapping the river bottom several times, we stopped abruptly and bellied up to river bank. I was about to learn my first lesson in lancha travel.

The rainy season in the Amazon is roughly November to March. August and September are typically when the rivers are at their lowest. Apparently, lanchas get stuck all the time in the low season, often for days until the river rises or a tugboat arrives to help. In the meantime, you wait and trade in the misinformation that runs rampant on lanchas, most of it perpetrated by anxious passengers. After parking against the river bank, the first rumor that we heard was the captain was prepared to wait a full week at the side of the river. The counter-theory — because there always was one — hinged on the more valuable cargo: We couldn’t wait a week because the cows had to get milked or they’d get sick. And there was fruit on board. If it rotted, Eduardo would have to pay for it. I wondered why someone in charge didn’t simply let us know what was happening. But that’s not the way it works. You wait, you trade rumors with other uninformed people. It’s how you fill the hours. You’re cargo, remember?

By sunset, another Eduardo boat had shown up with a cadre of dockworkers who, impossibly, began loading yet still more cargo onto our lancha. This went on deep into the night. The next morning — at 5:30 a.m., sunrise, a popular hour in la vida lancha — people began untying their hammocks to move to another boat, the Eduard VI, the same one we started on. Three hours later, we left the riverbank on our original boat and for almost an entire day and night, we chugged downriver without a hitch. The pace was slow but steady, the breeze heavenly, the view serene.

La Vida Lancha

But the real action was on the boat itself. Everyone talked with everyone, Peruvians and gringos, adults and children, crew and passengers. After a 15-hour stop at a riverbank, time becomes a relative thing. And that, I realized might be the point of traveling via lancha, why it’s okay to be the least important cargo. Because, honestly, the river is amazing — the brown swirl of it, the banks lined with never-ending foliage, the giant pristine beaches that emerge when the river is low — but it all starts to blend together after a while. The trip is more about the people you meet, the life temporarily lived in close quarters, the surprising cultural mash-up it creates.

For example, there were: the crazy Brazilian kid who constantly smoked kete (a cocaine byproduct) and then babbled non-stop in Portuguese-Spanish gibberish; the two husbands with pregnant wives who dutifully waited on their every need; the woman next to us with the pet bird; the four young German chicks who spoke Spanish and got hit on mercilessly by every bachelor on the boat (and loved it!), the kids who roved in packs using the lancha as their personal playhouse…I learned more about Peru in the first few days on the boat than I had in the entire month I’d spent in Lima.

Stuck in the Amazon River

On day three, around mid-morning, we got stuck for real. You could tell because the captain proceeded to madly rev the giant diesel engine in a series of back and forth maneuvers that ultimately dug us in deeper to the river bed. The speculation game began again. How long could we remain stuck? Hours, days? Would they bring another boat to offload us? When? An hour or so later, a tugboat arrived and began frantically circling the lancha, occasionally attaching itself via steel cable, yanking us around, eventually freeing us after 45 minutes. Later that afternoon there was more drama — a freak rain storm that was so sudden and intense it forced the boat to the side of the river. We were told to put on lifejackets, of which there were not nearly enough. A young terrified kid told me that last year during a similar storm a lancha had flipped over and everyone died. How could that be? I asked, we were in less than eight feet of water and next to a river bank. He waved me off and went in search of someone else to scare.

After the storm passed (everyone lived), the great debate about when we’d actually get to Iquitos began. It had been four full days since we arrived in Yurimaguas, three since we’d left port. Everyone, myself included, was getting a little antsy. On the morning of day four at — you guessed it, 5:30 a.m. — we got stuck in the harbor outside of Nauta. Along with my travel companion and a dozen or so other passengers, we decided to get off the boat. There was road from Nauta to Iquitos. By colectivo, it’s only an hour and a half. As if sensing our decision, a handful of water taxis arrived from Nauta to offer us a ride into port. We pounced. As we sped away, I felt a pang of guilt for not completing the journey. But it was time to move on. Four days of being cargo was enough for me. Iquitos was waiting.



John Meils is a freelance writer living in Peru. He recently wrote about the ayahuasca experience. To see more of his work, visit johnmeils.com.

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1 Comments

# Ralph Jarvis says :
20 September, 2010 [ 06:06 ]

Thanks for this and your recent ayahuasca story John. I had the fortunate experience to travel this same route on an Eduardo in early February. Your account echoed many of my memories from that trip. I fortunately didn't have to do the lancha shuffle and the river was much higher in that season. There was great birding from the boat, fascinating exchanges of people and cargo at each port, photo ops and fast friends galore. Yes, the charted course might have been a little vague at times. As you point out, the drifting along at close quarters with so many other people greatly enriched the journey. The beauty of the natural world completed it. I look forward to reading your impressions of Iquitos!

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