New York, New York!

I'm eating moldy sawdust, or what the airline-issued cardboard box claims is coffee cake. "For those of you sitting on the left-hand side of the aircraft, you can see the lights of Havana, Cuba as we pass above it," the pilot announces. I glance outside, mid-bite.

I guess this is where I should be sentimental. I should reflect on my last six weeks in Peru and list the ways in which it has changed me. I should dedicate this blog to all that I will miss.

But that's not what I'm thinking right now as I look at Cuba.
CUBA. I'm out of Peru. I'm heading HOME.
I try to summon sentimentality, but it doesn't come.

Don't get me wrong - You would have to offer me a handsome sum to snatch these last six weeks away from me. I got to share an ecologist's enthusiasm for sticky liquids, to listen to an Amazon artisan sing native tales as she weaves her chambira, to play in a soup of tadpoles. I liked this adventure.

But all along, I knew I was going home. I came as a traveler, passing through moments of people's lives. I made friends, but I knew I would soon leave them. We would probably never see each other again. But knowing this made our limited time together better. We sang, we danced, we talked, and we didn't do it for a future friendship. All we had was this one song.

In Chino, Angel and I sang Te Amo by Makano until I could spit out all the lyrics with only minor slurring. On the airplane, I plug in my earphones and listen to Makano. "He's just not that into you" is playing on the TV above my seat, but I choose Makano. In this way, I wave good-bye to Peru. This is the extent of my sentimentality.

I feel heavy. I did not sleep last night. I went out to a karaoke bar and discoteca with Yully and Angel. And then it was 5 a.m. and I was taking a motorkar to the Iquitos airport.
Now I fall asleep to Cuba and Makano. "Espera, por favor no te vayas..."

This adventure was everything it should have been. I had fun. I was challenged. And now I have a new adventure waiting for me at home. I have a new apartment, five new classes, a new writing gig, several new bellydances to learn, a brother that's getting married in October, a mom with a new brick house, and Argentinian tango lessons with my Malibu.

"Ladies and gentlemen, the seatbelt sign is now on." New York's hodgepodge of lights stretches out below me. I'm HOME. My stomach lurches. Maybe it's excitement, or maybe it's the coffee cake.

Intermission

Monday morning at sunrise our boat from Jenaro Herrera arrives in Iquitos. We hang around the city for four days. Campbell, Angel and Yully run a few distillations with the copal resin that we brought back from Jenaro Herrera. Copal smell saturates Campbell's hotel room (and hallway, and lobby).

Between experiments, Campbell runs around Iquitos in a hurried attempt to get an export permit. If he doesn't get all the paperwork signed and stamped before he leaves for Lima, he won't be able to take the hundreds of oil, resin and bug samples out of Peru. I intentionally distance myself from this process. The mind-numbing boredom of official-looking stacks of papers utterly terrifies me.

I eat a cone of coconut ice cream, every day.
I discuss roots and ocelot furs with the vendors of Belen and buy nine packs of mapacho (nicotiana rustica) cigars.

I spend an afternoon watching a street artist, Tomas, paint a Borra woman on a t-shirt. He sells each t-shirt for $15. He also creates bed-sized paintings, but he only works on those after taking ayahuaska. "When I have ayahuaska, I see the gods and godesses, " Tomas saya. "And that is what I put down on my canvas." In his paintings, frogs, raindroplets and nipples swirl out of rivers. Tomas tells me about his dead grandfather, who used to be a shaman. According to Tomas, his grandfather's bones continue to cure cancer patients. "My grandfather was like a god."

I watch a Hallmark movie dubbed in Spanish. The speakers' voices are all high-pitched and scratchy.
I spend $10 on Internet at a cafe that costs $0.70 per hour. I obviously miss my Internets, not to mention my Skype contacts.

Friday morning we leave for Chino, still fretting about signatures and still copying paperwork on our way to port.

You need a lot of patience here.

Our plan was to take a boat from Iquitos to Pebas, and then a peke-peke (long canoe with motor) to our destination, Brillo Nuevo. The first leg of our journey would be quick, because we would be heading down river. An 8 hour ride, they told us. Here´s how 8 turned into 42:

July 1
4pm:
Victor is a Peruvian field botanist that is accompanying us in the field. He´s also our go-to guy. Whenever we have a question, Victor has an answer.
Victor, when will the boat leave? Around 6. Maybe 7.
We arrive early to grab a cabin. Most people sleep in hammocks on the boat, but we need a cabin for our 9 bags of equipment. Two of the bags are big enough to store me comfortably.
5pm:
We take too many pictures. Victor´s on the right. And I´m the gringa (which roughly translates to sack of money with pale white skin).

5:40pm:
Campbell and I are exploring the lumber yard and drinking beer in a nameless bar at port. We´re talking about hitchhiking (Campbell has hitchhiked across the country 3 times) when I begin to worry that we will miss the boat.

5:45pm:
Oh no! The boat is leaving!
It´s already two meters away from shore! Two meters of grimy water!
Campbell and I consider wading through the river, but fortunately decide to hop on our moving boat via a neghboring boat.
No one else is freaking out. Victor is still on his cell, pacing around the beach. Silly gringos.
5:55pm:
"I think we are actually going to leave on time at 6," Campbell says. I nod. The boat is back at shore. Looks like the porters are almost done loading the boat with fish, bananas and ice.

7pm:
Victor is still on his cell, and the boat is still at port.
7:10pm:
The porters are now removing ice from the boat. Huh.
8:30pm:
The port captain says that the boat has too much weight on it. It appears to be sinking.
The porters remove more boxes of ice.
10pm:
The captain orders everyone to find a lifejacket. I snatch one off a beam above the hammocks, but Victor and Campbell do not find theirs in time. There aren´t enough lifejackets.
We are still at port.
Campbell, Victor and I discuss what to do if the boat sinks. Victor says it would be best to relax and let the current take you to shore.
11pm:
I´m sleeping. In brief moments of consciousness, I feel wobbly. The boat must be moving!

July 2
1am:
No more wobbly. Why has the boat stopped?
1:30am:
The boat has a hole in the bottom. That´s what they realized once they removed all that ice. We aren´t any closer to our destination. We are at a repair station.

(By this point you are getting tired of reading this. It´s so long-winded! When will it stop?! That´s exactly how I felt on the boat, except I couldn´t scroll down to find out the ending.)

9am:
I wake up with a sore throat, stuffed nose, and a ringing headache. Locals blame my sickness on the humidity. Stupid river.
I meet a friend:

10am:
Victor gets a message from his university. He has to go defend his thesis, and he has to do it immediately. So he won´t be accompanying us. He suggests his friend Julie instead.
Bye Victor. Lucky you, you get to leave this boat.
We are still at the repair station.
11:30am:
The port captain inspects the boat (again) and deems it unsafe (again). We leave the repair station and return to our original port. This boat won´t be leaving, they tell us. We must now lug our body bags onto a different boat.
12:30pm:
Our new boat is expected to leave at 8pm. I do not have such expectations.
1pm:
We eat a two-course lunch, with drink, for $1.50, and then get a $7 hotel room for the afternoon.
1:30pm:
I pass out on the bed for three hours. When I wake up, it feels as if someone is sawing my head. F****** river!
2pm:
Campbell meets Julie, and learns that Julie is Victor´s wife. We have now effectively exchanged Julie for Victor. Hello, Julie.
6pm:
Our original boat leaves. We are in the hotel room.
7pm:
Back on board the new boat. Why is this boat so dark?

(Stay with me now, we´re almost there.)

7:30pm:
There´s no electricity. It needs to be fixed. So we wait.
8pm:
We´re not leaving on time, but that was expected.
10pm:
Wobbly again! We´re moving!
10:15pm:
Aaaaaaaaaand... we stop. Time for a quick two hour break. Decided to unload some gasoline. (Try not to ask the obvious question - Why did they load all that gas in the first place?)

July 3
9am:
I´m getting used to this headache. I have accepted this boat.


We were expected to arrive at 8. I´m thinking 11.
9:30am:
I talk to Tim, a (former) engineer of pharmaceutical refridgerators. He´s traveling down the Amazon River for at least a few more weeks. Wow, that´s a lot of boat. (How´d it go, Tim?)
11am:
Ok, I think we´ll get there by noon.
11:30am:
Tim and I are talking. Mid-sentence, I notice that everyone else is eating. We missed our free boat lunch! We go down to the lower deck, and then down to the storage room, and then over five barrels of gasoline, to ask for our styrofoam dishes of yuca, chicken and rice. The lunch lady is chopping onions in a toilet-sized kitchen. She throws the peels overboard.
Noon:
I SEE PEBAS.
Now it´s time for our 4-hour peke-peke ride to our destination, Brillo Nuevo.

(Wow, you made it through. Now that´s commitment.)

Iquitos, the city of sweat and buzz

We say that the jungle teems with macaws, monkeys and mosquitoes. We paint the Amazon River blue and green with hints of red.

But so far, I haven´t seen that. This riverbank is green, but also gray and yellow with a fringe of purple lights. It has a playground with screaming children in collared shirts. There´s a cement boardwalk. A short wrinkly man sells monkey and bear balloons. There´s a bar on the river that serves Pisco sour with lime, sugar and beaten egg white. Whitney Houston belts through the bars´speakers. ¨Iiiiiiiii will always love youoooouuuu...¨

This is Iquitos, a city of more than 400,000 on the Amazon River, the largest city in the world that has no roads connecting it to the outside.

Cars are a novelty here. Instead, motorcycles and ¨motokars¨-- three-wheeled motorbike taxis with room for two passengers -- zip through the streets. The motorcycles create a constant buzz in the city, like a troop of mosquitos that circles your head.


Iquitos is not completely disconnected from its surrounding rainforest. It is sweaty, sticky and flat.

The city lights up at night, but the river plummets into darkness as the sun sets. Friends and couples stroll along the river, holding hands and looking out into the jungle. The Amazon River seems so distant now, swallowed by mystery.