We´ve Got Fun and Games

We´re still in Iquitos, though it looks like we´re heading toward the border tomorrow. This is a wonderful town, the people are so incredibly warm and friendly. They aren´t always after you to give them something like most of the other places I´ve been in Peru. Maybe a little conversation every once in a while, but nothing more. They like to talk. A young kid approached me the other day as I was walking along a park on the river and we started talking in English a little bit, then he found out I knew Spanish and asked me if I wanted to sit down and talk for a little while. I thought he wanted to practice English, but no. He just wanted to get to know me. Never asked for a thing. So sweet. And almost everyone is that way.

But enough talk. Here´s some promised eye candy.
This is the land of hammocks. Crowded but comfortable. I love that the man next to me is texting as we drift down jungle waters.

This is what most all of the sunsets look like here. Breathtaking. The only ones I´ve ever seen to rival them are Arizonan, but those are because of the smog. Or so I´m told. There´s no smog here.

South America is full of men in ambiguous uniforms. This was a whole parade of them marching around the main plaza. These were the only ones not carrying fully automatic weapons.

We were invited to visit a small community, a short boat ride outside of the city, and this is the sidewalk that led us to it. Kind of surreal to see a sidewalk running through the middle of the jungle. We decided it was a natural phenomena, created by a sophisticated ant colony. Ants love sidewalks.

Thinking about ants.

We bumped into some old friends from the Sacred Valley in Iquitos, and their friends (and now ours as well) are the ones staying in this little paradise.

It´s been great visiting with them. They left the Valley a few weeks before us, and we still managed to catch them, which goes to show you how most people travel here. They are 5 girls and a little boy, and they´re affording their travels by playing music, juggling, and selling their crafts. They left here yesterday, but we´re all going in the same direction, so we´re certain to see them again soon.

This is the main structure on the land. The incredibly large table also serves as an incredibly large bed for a few of the residents and for visitors.

All of the guys were very welcoming. A few were musicians and a few, jugglers, and good ones. I hadn´t passed clubs since Lebn left, so I was glad to find them.

This is my best buddy, Lautaro. He´s the little boy travelling with the girls and we got to know each other pretty well in the valley. We´d just been swimming in the water here that´s source is 100 meters from this bridge. Incredibly refreshing.

It was a great little excursion though we only stayed a night. Brazil´s call is getting stronger though, and there´s more jungle a head. Tallyhoo!

A Lazy River and Lots of Hammocks

We made it to Iquitos after over 40 hours on a bus and 2 days on a boat. The first bus we were on broke down, then we waited for another to pick us up, finally arrived at our destination, Yurimaguas, 10 hours late, grabbed a moto-taxi to race to the market, buy a hammock and make it to the port for the 2 p.m. departure time, only to find out that the boat had already left. But they told us we could stay onboard the one departing the next day for free that night, so we did. Technically then, we were on the boat for three days. But we had hammocks. Unfortunately, there wasn´t much of a breeze.
The climate change has been drastic, but it really hasn´t been that bad. We went from Lima, where we frequently had to wear sweatshirts during the day and it was almost always cloudy, to the jungle, where it´s sunny almost always and we sleep without covers at night. But it is exactly what I´ve wanted since I arrived in South America. I think I´ve been cold since I got here, all my time spent in the winter and the mountains. And now I can´t stop sweating, my clothes are stuck to my body, and I love it.
The boat was a pretty great experience. It was like a ferry, with a big open space for all of the passengers, but it was packed with hammocks. There were easily more than a hundred of them when the boat was its most full. A sea of hammocks. It felt like we´d all been through some natural disaster and where thrown together in a high school gym or something. But its just how you travel here, and though everyone is bumping each other, and hammocks are bumping, and its hot and there´s little to do, everyone gets along fine, waiting patiently and chatting idly, and looking forward to meal time. Three squares a day. But there´s almost always people from the villages along the way coming aboard to sell snacks and drinks when the boat stopped to make deliveries. The whole cargo hold of the boat was full of bananas, fish, soda, etc. though, thankfully, the smell never reached us on the second floor.
And now we´re in Iquitos and we´ll be here a couple of days to explore and try to sell a little bit. It´s 2 or 3 more days by boat to the border, where we´ll probably have to stay to wait for my visa to process, and then we finally get to enter Brazil.
I´ll post some more pictures if I can find a faster internet connection somewhere.
And once I take some more pictures.
Peace and love and other hippie junk.

Fevers and Dreams of the Jungle

We left the project in Ica a week ago, because it was time to move on. It may have been past due, as my final two and a half days were spent with a fever that reached a hundred and four degrees at its worst. As though the illness wasn´t bad enough, the location only made things worse. Hot in the day, cold at night and loud, sandy, and angry, 24-hours a day. It was starting to feel like the whole place was trying to kill me. It was time to leave.
I would have like to see a finished house, I would have liked to build an earthbag house too, but at the rate things were moving, we would have been there a year before I saw the completion of

those two dreams. And besides... the Amazon, Brazil, and a Rainbow Gathering are calling, and the call is strong.
So I´ve spent the last week recuperating in Lima at the house of a friend. In addition to recovery - Naty got sick just as I was getting better - we´ve been trying to make as much money as possible before we make the trip. It hasn´t been great, but its been somewhat steady. Another friend put some of our stuff at her table in a craft fair and we took to the streets, filling our time more with activities found in the provided pictures.

If you follow the path a bit further, you find yourself overlooking the beach and a good part of the city. There are worse places to spend a sunny weekend afternoon.

Lima has been good to me. There´s an abundance of nice neighborhoods to stroll through, with lots of parks, the beach, and lots of good, cheap food around every corner. We did splurge on some Sushi the other night though. I didn´t eat meat for the entire duration of my stay in Ica, so this was my celebratory release of cravings for meat. It was delicious.

We´ve been spending a good amount of time just hanging out around the house. It´s been nice and quiet and comfortable. Lots of reading and juggling and writing and napping. And eating. Repeat. And some working sometimes. Grillo made paper airplanes when he wasn´t busy editing a magazine. Naty prepared Maté and worked more than me.

But we´re refreshed and recharged and we´re leaving tomorrow or Tuesday, a bus to a place, then to another, then another, and then to Iquitos, where we catch the boat down the Amazon. We have to stop at the border - so I can pay the gouging $100 visa fee to enter Brazil - then switch to another boat, but then we´re in Brazil and the heart of the Amazon. In a hammock. We still have to buy the hammocks.