The Amazon, Lite

Hello, everyone, from the middle of the Amazon! Now, of course, as I write this, I have a singular lightbulb illuminating me, and there’s no internet connection within miles of here, so these will all be delayed… Today has been a whirlwind of a day, so let’s skip the formalities and get moving.

For those of you who don’t know, I’m in Peru right now with my friend Zack, who’s in chemical engineering at Michigan. He runs a club called INvent, whose primary focus is a trip down to Peru in May at the end of each school year to teach local high schoolers about engineering. And since nobody in his club wanted to come along, he asked me if I’d join. We begin teaching in Lima on May 20, but since neither of us start work until June 3, we figured that we’d get a head start and travel beforehand.

 After 24 hours of planes and layovers, we made it from Detroit to Iquitos, Peru—the city of the Amazon. Iquitos is a city of about 500,000 residents smack dab in the middle of the Peruvian Amazon, and getting off the plane, boy, you know you’re in a rainforest. The plane ride was quite cold, but as soon as we got off, we were greeted with a blast of humid, hot air. Our chauffeur took us downtown, where met our tour guide for the rest of the week and gave our temporary farewells to human civilization. I always say that the drive into the final destination is always my favorite part of the “travel” experience; it’s when you get the first glimpse the culture, ethos, architectural style, and demographic of your destination. And this time was no exception. The drive into Iquitos transported us instantly into a new world: one of hot weather, warm people, and fish galore. One of shacks, huts, and tuk-tuks. Now, out of Iquitos’s 500,000 residents, there’s an estimated 100,000 tuk-tuks on the road, and you can certainly tell that they love their tuk-tuks here. Despite this, we took a car coming from the airport.

We were dropped off at our tour office, where we met our guide Antonio (Tony). Tony is super cool, very knowledgeable about the ecosystem around him, and an overall a very wholesome, inspiring, and confident guy. I am so excited to have him as our guide through the forest, and I have my full confidence that he’ll give us a great mix of new, scary experiences with the baseline that everything will be okay in the end.

After repacking our bags, leaving some stuff at the office, and picking out our river boots, we drove from Iquitos down to a town called Nauta. Tony’s home has been, for the last few decades, Nauta, however he’s originally from a small plot of land owned by his family about 30 minutes downriver from Nauta. The family moved to Nauta permanently when Tony was in high school, but they still keep their plot of land for farming and fishing. I’ll discuss more of this later.

The drive down to Nauta was, at first, beautiful. We saw some of the most colorful buildings teeming with life that I’ve ever seen, all lined up against each other on both sides of the road. As we left Iquitos, the buildings got sparser and sparser until we were left in just forest. Now, I had imagined that the Amazon would have really tall trees, so tall that you may have to crane your neck to see the top. This was, after all, kind of how El Yunque rainforest was in Puerto Rico, and if the Amazon is the rainforest to rule all rainforests, then shouldn’t it also have crazy tall trees? Well, mi amigo, turns out we need to go deeper.

Upon arriving in Nauta, we transferred all our stuff onto the back of tuk-tuks and hit the town. We met Tony’s dad and brother—his dad is driving our boat all week, and the boat is his brother’s. Now, some of you (ahem, mom) may be worried about my safety on a tuk-tuk. And yes, you may be right to question it, but I tell you every single person in this town was on a tuk-tuk, and there were zero cars. In the meantime, Zack and I had a great time on the first tuk-tuk ride of either of our lives, and I’m looking forward to doing it again on our way back!

As Tony’s from Nauta, he took us around the town a little bit (which he wasn’t supposed to do). The town is a little more run-down than Iquitos is, and definitely less touristy. We were, it felt, the only tourists in the whole town, and frankly, I haven’t seen a single other tourist since we left Iquitos for Nauta. Anyways, he first took us to the pond in the middle of the city, where we got our first glimpse at the simultaneously beautiful and terrifying wildlife that we’d be immersing ourselves in for the next four days. He handed us some bread and instructed us to throw it into the lake. Within an instant, dozens of hungry, snapping little fish all fought for the opportunity to get their mouth on a bite of soggy bread. Throw in some more in a different spot… boom! Same thing. There must have been tens of thousands of these little scavenger fish in this pond, all invisible to the breadless observer. Soon after, three different species of turtles, as well as several gigantic pikes (paiche) snapped up from the bottom, opening their chasmous mouths to engulf both the bread, and the poor fish trying to eat it.

We sat around for a long time doing this, buying and then throwing more bread in, hoping to get, say, the pike to jump out of the water, hoping that the turtle would beat the scavengers to the slice, or trying to see how many scavengers you could end up with. I, personally, was on team turtle the whole time, and I lamented when the turtle would lose to the scavengers. We nearly saw a turtle get sucked out of its shell by a pike, but luckily, he was able to escape with his life. Ah, the food chain. A common topic of discussion amongst the three of us these days.

As I said, not a single tourist was at this pond. It was just us and some locals. It was refreshing, knowing that what I was doing wasn’t performative, wasn’t to line someone’s wallets, but rather, was just me stepping into someone else’s life for an afternoon, gleaming a childlike wonder, hope, and happiness out of it.

We then grabbed a lunch before setting out on the river. We headed to Tony’s favorite spot, where we ordered three different species of fish. I ordered pike, Zack, catfish, and I have not the slightest clue what Tony ordered. Despite being terrified of the pike from the pond, Zack and I felt determined to show it who’s really at the top of the food chain here, and felt it necessary to secure our dominance—and thus, feign a sense of self security—before we went into the real deal. Though I usually don’t like fish, I can confidently say this was the single most delicious piece of fish I’d ever had in my life. It was perfectly seasoned and didn’t taste “fishy” at all. It also came with a side of plantains, some tomatoes, soup, and rice.

Pulling out of Nauta

From here, it was time to enter the Amazon for real! We hopped on our boat and took off for the village of Buenos Aires, in the middle of the Pacaya-Samiria reserve. At this point, time stood still. There was no such thing as time. My phone was but a camera, my watch, dead, and I changed the numeral system on my phone to be in a language I don’t understand so that I could completely remove myself from the world. Given all the…politics…that decided to accompany the end of my junior year, I was more than ready to disconnect from the world totally, living completely off of the small amount of things we brought with us, the animals in the jungle, and my trust in Tony and his father.  

Of course, I was enamored with the boat. So allow me to get some naval architecture-y stuff out of the way first. The boat was a single propeller, single displacement hull made entirely out of wood with a nice canopy over it made from dried leaves. The hull was very slender, leading to us often placing a heel (tip) on the boat in the transverse (side to side) direction. The propulsion system was a 13 horsepower Honda gasoline engine attached to the stern on a two axis pivot system, with a fixed rudder (possibly to reduce flow swirl?) at the end. It allowed for a surprising amount of maneuverability for a ship of that slenderness, as the shaft was quite long, and therefore could provide a substantial yawing moment on the ship. The two axes allowed you to control both the shaft angle and the angle in the yaw direction. At its max speed, it was traveling, according to Tony, at 0.86 kts (7 kph). At this slow speed, it took us over five hours to reach Buenos Aires, but that gave Zack and I ample time to nap after our sleepless hours of travel, as well as admire the wonderful views, and discuss with Tony the ins-and-outs of the Amazon. (We had a layover from 9:30 PM to 4:30 AM in Lima, during which, there was constant noise and light in the airport, and we were sleeping on the ground, trying to make sure our stuff wasn’t being stolen out from under us). Using the horsepower of the engine and the max speed, I’m sure you could come up with a speed-vs-power and therefore, a resistance-vs-power profile for the boat, but maybe I’ll leave that to future Ian who is most certainly missing NAVARCH 332. Underneath the panels, there’s some room for rainwater to accumulate. It isn’t deep enough to use as a ballast tank, and in the mornings, I saw our driver scooping the water out of the ship and into the river.

The river we were on was not the Amazon. It was one of the Amazon’s tributaries, the Marañón. It, along with the Ucayali, forms the border of the Pacaya-Samiria reserve—a reserve so massive that though we traveled in it for five hours straight, we hardly made a dent in it. Traveling from one end to the other takes about four days of continuous boating.

That’s the first curious thing I picked up on—nothing here is measured in distance, only in time. They say that the Pacaya-Samiria reserve begins exactly one hour upstream from the confluence of the two tributaries of the Amazon. We were told that we’d be heading five hours upstream, and we asked how far it was to Lima, to which he answered in days. Clearly, despite my desperate attempt to remove myself from the concept of time, the people of the Amazon let time dictate their worldview. Maybe there’s something inherently rain forest-y about this. At 5:30, as the sun was half an hour from setting, birds began to fly from one side of the Marañón to the other. Tony says this is like clockwork… they cross the river to hunt from their safe homes on the north bank. Clearly, an internal clock is crucial and ingrained in Amazon life.

For the first five hours, which were all spent on the Marañón, the water was all so-called “brown water.” The brown water is of normal pH, has faster moving currents, and has parasites and dangerous species in it. It’s not recommended that you even pee, let alone swim, in the brown waters. The brown color comes mostly from the sand and dirt that’s being swept up from the bottom, since there’s a faster current in the areas where we see it. The Marañón is very wide, and Zack and I frequently were commenting on our amazement about its width.

The checkpoint at the enterance of the reserve 

Once we got to the first checkpoint for the Pacaya Samiria reserve, we, before parking the boat, stopped in the middle of the river for a little bit. Zack and I stepped out from the covered area for the first time and onto the bow. At this point, we both collectively realized how beautiful the area we were entering was. But we weren’t admiring for long before we heard a splash. Tony hurriedly informed us that this was a dolphin, and our heads all snapped in that direction. Alas, we both missed it. I think both of us were convinced that it’d be rare, and we were disappointed we’d missed it, before once again, splash.  A few times a minute, from somewhere random in the area around us, we’d hear splashes. We’d jerk our heads in that direction, hoping to catch it, and though often unsuccessful, we both had our fair share of times we caught the dolphin gasping for air. We saw here both the pink and the gray dolphins there, and as we moved inwards, we’d continue to see many more. So many more, in fact, that the sound of a dolphin surfacing for air no longer excited us.

This was our first interaction with black water. In contrast to brown water, black water has a high pH, killing most prospective parasites. Though we shouldn’t drink the black water, indigenous communities often will, and they will also seriously avoid the brown water. On another note about diseases, contrary to popular belief, the mosquitos here do not carry malaria nor dengue. They do in other parts, but in the reserve in particular, they just bite you. Tony telling us that made both of us feel much better (I write, scratching the countless bites on my legs, feet, and elbows, despite applying bug spray five times today). Once black water begins down a stream, all water from there on up is black water. Fish, such as sardines, salmon, and piranhas still do live in black water, though, as well as other animals like anacondas.

This video is from our way home, so it shows black water turning into brown water

We forged deeper through the Yanayaku tributary of the Marañón until we got to the village of Buenos Aires. The village, founded in 1971, consists of only a few houses on stilts, all surrounding a wide-open grassy area. Close to the river, they have a crab hatching area and small port, where they export, for example, local aguaje berries to Iquitos and from there, to larger companies. There’s also a set of concrete slabs forming a soccer court, with some wooden goalposts around, and though I desperately wanted to join the little kids playing soccer, I decided that it’s better to wait for Lima, when the kids aren’t 50 pounds, 3 ft tall, and strangers.  

Though are were staying in a guesthouse, we are the only ones here, and we could tell by the guest log that there were very few who had been here recently. Again, we felt like the only tourists in the whole area. But, the area was not lacking of locals. The evening ambiance of Buenos Aires was, if not hopping, at least somewhat lively, and the kids certainly brought up the energy. What’s interesting is that, though many kids move from the villages into the larger cities, eventually, over generations, making their way to Lima, there’s a large amount of people returning to the rainforest. These communities are not dying, and Amazon life is not endangered. Tony said that increasing political instability in Peru over the last few years led to people escaping altogether and going back to their roots in the jungle. It was nice to hear that, because I would have not imagined that to be the case. In fact, the Peruvian government cannot sell Amazon land; they can give it to you for free, however, in case you decide to move there, as long as you agree to replant a tree for each one you cut down.

Buenos Aires

Though this day wasn’t over yet, I’m going to leave this entry off here. Hasta luego!