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thetravellingvagrant · 5 years

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Day 9: Iquitos- In Which I Could Have Touched A Sloth, If I Really Tried

I'm gonna be honest with you; this entry may as well just be exactly the same text as yesterday's one but with the pictures of the animals changed. We did nearly exactly the same things; woke up; ate a breakfast of shitty children's cereal which I still couldn't taste; waited for the rain to stop, which it did not, before decided to go out, to an animal sanctuary, regardless. The sanctuary in question, today was one named Pilpintuwasi and boasted a bit of a richer selection of animals than yesterday's offering, for us to gawp at, slack jawed, like the idiots we are. It also had a butterfly farm attached to it. Which, y'know. Fine.

We took a motor-taxi to Bellavista; the port from which we had left for the rainforest, a few days prior, ignored all the big fatty grubs, roasting on skewers and made our way to the 'colectivo' boat; which I can best describe as a very cheap bus-boat... sort of thing. You do better.

The colectivo whisked us away to the mid-sized jungle town of Padre Coche, in around thirty minutes or so. Once there, we got on board yet another motor-taxi – the novelty of which still haven't worn off for me- which took us to the sanctuary, proper. Excited at the prospect of seeing sloths, we wandered along a covered, wooden walkway into the reception.

This’n, here.

We paid the entrance fee; a frankly staggering 30 soles (...around £6.50, but again, our budgeting has been a bit lacklustre.) and were met by our guide, Reese. A Welshman, but I didn't hold that against him, as he was, otherwise, really quite nice. He was new in Pilpintuwasi and had given up eating leeks and voting for Brexit to volunteer at the sanctuary, full time. Reese delivered a professional, yet personable tour throughout, despite the fact that, in the intermittent period between our arrival and our setting off into the grounds of the sanctuary, the heavens had properly opened and we were entirely saturated with water, almost the moment we stepped outside. I'm glad I chose to wear my khakis. Did you know they get ever so slightly see-through when wet. I didn't.

The park itself was large, sprawling and housed a myriad (menagerie?) of exotic animals (most of which, again, were being primed for release into the wild). I won't list them off, in this particular entry, as I'm very tired and would much rather just coil into a ball and die than dispassionately list a series of different animals what I saw, but I definitely will dump a load of pictures of them, afterwards. Just be aware that they were all basically great (apart from the butterflies, which. Y'know. Fine.)

After an hour or so of squelching through the rain, our time at the sanctuary and with Reese drew to a close. Once more we were offered the opportunity to amble about to our hearts content, which we did, briefly, following a (really quite rare) Uakari monkey

Also called the English Monkey, because it has an angry little red face and ginger hair, which honestly, is a bit rude.

taking pictures while it chewed on leaves and very obviously wished we would just fuck off and leave it alone, but, as with yesterday, Sam's illness very selfishly began flaring up and we had to leave.

We walked back to the colectivo through Padre Coche, which we thought would be quite fun, but actually ended up being an unexpectedly harrowing experience; the town is jam-packed with stray dogs in various states of disrepair. Some mangy, some lame, some basically dead; quite a lot all three. We put our heads down and powered through to the dock, trying not to think about the nightmarish dog concentration camp we had just walked through and hopped back onto the boat, vowing to never speak of the horrors we had just witnessed. Shockingly, and very, very irritatingly, it was incredibly cold in Iquitos, today. You don't really expect it in the rainforest, but honestly, I stepped off the boat, back in Bellavista, noticeable shivering. What the fuck, the Amazon? That's like the one thing you're supposed to be good at.

I stopped briefly at one of the market stalls to buy myself a little sausage and a skewer of...some weird massive seeds, whose name I have forgotten, both of which almost certainly gave me worms, and ate them clumsily on the motor-taxi ride back to our apartment, spilling my bottle of water over my just-about-dry khakis, making it look like I'd pissed myself in the process. It was all coming up, Millhouse.

Once inside, we took some hot showers, to warm ourselves back up, from being in the rainforest, before getting our respective bibbles on, writing blogs, reading books and watching the final of the Copa America on our generously proportioned TV. Peru lost by the way. Of course they did.

Soon though, hunger - that big bastard -reared its ugly head once more and, given that we had almost no food whatsoever in the flat and the thought of walking to and from the supermarket and then cooking something was enough to make us both genuinely angry, we decided to just treat ourselves to a meal out. Budget be damned! (I was very worried about the budget).

We went to a little restaurant on the boulevard called the Amazon Bistro, took our seats, ordered some food and waited, listening to the soothing ambiance of the Amazon...being totally drowned out by a playlist of 80s power-ballads. Then we waited some more. And some more, after that... Finally, after around half an hour, our drinks arrived. A bottle of water, each. How did this take thirty minutes? Whatever the reason, it did not bode well for the rest of our meal.

Eventually, after sixteen and a half years, our food appeared. Sort of. My order was quite badly botched and instead of bacon, they had just smeared my burger with horrible mushrooms, in a thick mushroomy sauce, which, as anyone who knows me will surely already be aware of, I treat essentially as a war crime. Now in a bad mood, but in no way wanting to wait another hour for a sub-par burger with the actually correct toppings, I scraped the mushrooms to the side and ate everything they hadn't touched. To add insult to injury, halfway through the meal, our waitress returned to the table to – I think, anyway- tell me that she had gotten my order wrong, but also apparently to do nothing about it? Fine. It didn't matter; I couldn't taste it properly, anyway, so in a way, I win.

The least happy meal I have eaten on this entire trip, including those little baby squid, now over, we dragged ourselves along the five minute walk back to the apartment, tucked ourselves into bed, eager to begin a new leg of the journey, and generally also not just be sweaty literally all the time, tomorrow.

#travelling #vagrant #peru #iquitos #pilpintawasi #butterfly #farm #sloths #tapir #jaguar #ocelot #jungle #amazon #animals #travel #photograph #photography

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