Monday, March 9, 2020. We flew from Lima to Iquitos, providing one last look at the pretty coast by Miraflores. It’s about a two hour flight, over the Andes, and then into the rainforest area. We saw none of the Andes though, because they were in the clouds.
But as we got close to Iquitos, I got a nice view of the Nanay river, one of the many tributaries of the Amazon, and of the forest itself, which, from here, looks endless.....
We drove into Iquitos, a town of 700,000 inhabitants, and 50,000 motorized rickshaws (I’m not making this number up). The ratio of cars to rickshaws must be 1/100. But the traffic works very efficiently. Side note: the rickshaws (tuktuks) we’re introduced when a local businessman went to Thailand and saw them and decided they would work well here. They do!. The town has schools, a university, a hospital, a Hilton hotel (where we had lunch), and electricity all day long, which is not true of most of the villages in the region. It cannot be reached by road, but only by boat or plane. All equipment, all supplies, and all food that cannot be grown or gathered locally is brought by plane, or by boat on the Amazon. In fact, most of the motorized rickshaws are Hondas, because Honda has a assembly plant there: they ship containers of parts, which is easier than shipping the actual thing. This being Peru, potatoes are a very important staple - but all potatoes need to be flown in: potatoes do not grow here because the soil is too wet (neither do onions, garlic, carrots,,, etc). However, the jungle is plentiful in many other ways - providing many kinds of bananas and other fruit - and 3000 types of fish! Our guide grew up in a small village on the river (10 families, no electricity, travel exclusively by canoe...). His story is indeed fascinating, and I’ll detail it later - anyway, he said “only lazy people go hungry in the rainforest, because there is so much food to be gathered. We, however, had the luxury of being lazy.... since they just fed us at the Hilton (by a long shot the fanciest building in town, located on its main square, which, oddly, also includes this so-called “metal house”, which was designed and built by Gustave Eiffel (of Eiffel Tower fame). It was, supposedly going to Quito, but wound up in iQUITOs instead! No WiFi for the next five days means that this piece of information will remain mysterious and unexplained for at least 5 days....
After lunch, we drove on the only road out of Iquitos. It goes about 100 km to the smaller town of Nauta (about 7000 inhabitants), Then it stops. It is the only road in this entire district. It’s in relatively good shape, but crowded with a lot of the 3 wheel Honda things, which makes it hard for a bus to go much faster than 50 km/hour. So the trip took 2 hours. Along the way, we passed little villages- the houses mostly made of corrugated metal and bricks, where there were a lot of dogs just roaming around (they did look friendly though). Certainly a very poor area but again, no one looked hungry.
Finally, we arrived in the little town of Nauta, where we embarked the Zafiro- our floating home for the next five days. (See picture at top of this blog). 
I looks a bit like the ship in the movie “the African Queen”, but with AC and a Jacuzzi.
As we were pulling away from Nauta, the local fishermen in their dug out canoes where coming back to town.
There are 32 of us tourists on this ship - it’s a nice small group, and everyone we have met is nice and interesting.
We were treated to our first sunset on the river. Getting up at 5:30 am tomorrow for our first exploration - animals are most active at dawn!
So going to bed early.
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