There are some towns you can’t just check in to. However tired you are, however long the journey, just grabbing the room key, pulling the curtains and crashing out isn’t an option — you have to step out and explore. And I challenge anyone who takes a scooter-taxi from the tiny airport to the centre of Iquitos — feeling the warm, sticky Amazonian air for the first time — to leave this city alone till breakfast. You can sense you’ve reached somewhere a bit special.
In simply statistical, Guinness Book of Records terms, Iquitos is indeed unique. Buried deep in the Amazon basin, almost pointlessly declared to be in Peru, this is the world’s largest city with no roads in or out: 400,000 people, with just a mighty river and a sketchy runway to help them see the world, something the vast majority choose never to do. Even in the rain, it’s never cold here, everybody knows everybody, and the party starts at 5pm Thursday and finishes 5am Monday every week of the year — so why leave? Plus (as any tourist will be informed at least three times before they get their bags off the airport’s creaking, wonky carousel), this is probably South America’s safest city, with violent crime almost unimaginable and gallant thieves who routinely hand in stolen passports because they know what a hassle they are to replace and have no plans to go anywhere themselves. Armed with such reassurances, even though we’d come here to explore the jungle — specifically, to track down my all-time hero of the animal kingdom, the three-toed sloth — we dumped the bags and began a midnight stroll.
Stretched along a sweeping tributary just off the Amazon, Iquitos town centre is made up of colourful, shabbily maintained colonial buildings. The city’s manic pulse is set by the swarms of scooter-taxis and the “why brake if you’ve got a horn?” philosophy of the local drivers, creating a noise level you’d have to be born in to ignore — but relative peace reigns on the wide riverside promenade. Here, we met the locals in their permanent carnival, a surreal tropical passeggiata: children dwarfed by giant, garish balloons; transvestite street hawkers selling old hairclips and baubles; snake-oil salesmen — real snake-oil salesmen. The air filled, Willie Wonka-style, with bubbles (you buy a bag of soapy water and a straw for 10p). We acquired the most fashionable local accessory — an ice-cream cone as big as a bollard — and people-watched till our heads spun.
IQUITOS HAS found its way onto the South American tourist trail because of its proximity to primary — not yet a banana farm — rain- forest, but the all-pervading civic eccentricity ensures that most visitors stay a few days. The sightseeing list is not long: an iron house designed by Gustave “the Tower” Eiffel, which now doubles up, in true Iquitos style, as both a lively pub and the British consulate (the thieves hand the passports in over the bar); a zoo, of dubious ecological merit, considering the jungle starts in the suburbs; and, most unmissable, Belen market.
Now, you might consider yourself an old travel hand when it comes to these things — you’ve stayed calm in the souks of Marrakesh, bargained hard along the street stalls of Bangkok — but let’s see if you keep your cool here, ducking beneath tarpaulins and through crowded, noxious wooden alleys, dragged along by fast-running streams of humanity, past endless stalls straining beneath the hallucinatory produce of the Amazon. Lemons the size of cabbages, cabbages the size of basketballs, carrots as wide as your fist, alligator tails, turtle guts and armadillo meat from the butcher, the piranhas, pikes and fish that Disney couldn’t have dreamt of, all being scraped clean by an ear-splitting army of cackling fishwives — and the final straw, the old lady who emerges from the shadows and thrusts a grinning, eerily human, infant three-toed sloth into your face and asks you to name your price. Twenty minutes in, I was so disorientated, I approached a pet stall and asked if I could take a photo of the unfamiliar creature for sale next to the monkeys — it was, in my defence, a particularly unlovely baby.
Our finger-grip on sanity amid this mercantile maelstrom came courtesy of two boys, no more than 11 years old but with the worldly precocity of all slum kids, who had unilaterally declared themselves our guides for the day. They weaved through the mob, keeping an eye out for pickpockets and pointing out the produce with a gay abandon for the facts — nothing makes a fishwife laugh louder than the erroneous labelling of every catch on her stall a “really big piranha”.
After we could take no more market, the pair took us down to the riverbank, where Belen gets yet more unlikely. Very much the poor end of Iquitos, the whole district is made up of wooden shacks on stilts — and when the Amazon rises, the whole town floats up with it. We took a canoe out into the waterborne part of town. Our pocket guides made sure we spotted their own modest houseboats — the better to inflate their farewell tip — and left us on the riverbank in culture-shocked silence. I couldn ’t raise the energy to leave our balcony for the rest of the day.
Next morning, we learnt the funniest joke in the Amazon. To really appreciate it, you have to be waiting for a scooter-taxi in the hammering, crashing rain, God’s power shower shrinking you where you stand. Then a local wanders up, grinning like a crocodile, practically giving themselves a drum roll, they’re so amused by what they’re about to say, slaps a hand on your squelchy shoulders and delivers the punchline: “This is why they call it the rainforest, my friend!”
We were heading to Iquitos’s riverport, to begin our sodden journey into the primary rainforest. Muyuna Lodge, one of several jungle lodges within a few hours’ boat ride of the city, had mercifully invested in a boat that kept off the downpour and travelled fast, and we soon broke out into the main channel of the Amazon, to be bewildered once again. Calling this “the world’s largest river” is a disservice — it’s wider, stronger, darker, meaner, more awe-striking than those words convey. The Amazon is not a river, it’s a sea with purpose. As we gawped out of the window, the rain passed and the thick brown water offered up a brief glimpse of the oddities to come — a candyfloss-pink dorsal fin silently slicing the surface, then disappearing.
After Iquitos, the permanent jungle soundtrack of squawks, buzzes, hums and clicks that surrounded Muyuna Lodge came as blessed peace. The camp, just a few simple stilted huts, was on the banks of a narrow river, deep in the Amazonian “low jungle” — an unending plateau of lakes, swamps, mangroves and dense, mosquito-guarded forest.
Our daily routine here was set by the fauna. Only a dawn riverboat outing would catch the birds on the move, the faithful pairs of parakeets, the gangs of macaws and the flocks of egrets, the brooding hawks and stumbling vultures, the weavers, waders, screamers and kingfishers, all using the clear air above the river as their morning motorway. The daytime outings would then be spent following packs of monkeys or heading onto a lake to fish for piranhas and swim with those smiling, slightly lunar local mascots, the pink river dolphins (don’t worry: the piranhas are cowards, and only bite a man when he’s down). Finally, at night, we’d glide out again, to sweep our torches across the water in search of caymans.
In all these endeavours, we were entirely dependent on the Mastermind knowledge and preternatural eyesight of Victor, a jungle guide who could spot a basking iguana where others could only pick out half a mile of featureless foliage — and I would have been dearly grateful to him, were it not for the fact that I was only here for the sloths. After staring into the casual, beatific eyes of the stolen beast in the market, I was desperate to see one in the wild.
Though not, of course, running free. Almost statuesque in their lethargy, permanently, gently stoned on the leaf buds they absent-mindedly chew all day, sloths exude evolutionary calm amidst the bustle of the jungle — Zen monks made grey and furry. When Victor finally spotted one hanging from a branch high above the canopy, we cut the riverboat engine and sat in respectful silence, transfixed by the peaceful, passive, believably happy existence caught in our binoculars. This was the other side to Amazonian life — nature at peace.
As we started the outboard to leave, the sloth slowly raised a shaggy arm, in pursuit of one more leaf. Like a fool, I waved back.
Travel brief
Getting there: there are no direct flights from the UK or Ireland to Iquitos. Trailfinders (020 7938 3939, www.trailfinders.com) has flights from Heathrow or Manchester with Iberia Airlines and LanPeru, via Madrid and Lima; from £723. Or try Expedia (0870 050 0808, www.expedia.co.uk) or Travelselect (0871 222 3213, www.travelselect.co.uk).
Where to stay: Muyuna Lodge (00 51 65-242858, www.muyuna.com) has three nights, full-board, from £218pp, including transfers and guiding. The Loving Light Lodge (243180, www.junglelodge.com) has two nights, all-inclusive, from £169pp. El Dorado Plaza Hotel (222555, www.eldoradoplazahotel.com) is the best in Iquitos; doubles £145. Or try the Victoria Regia (231983, www.victoriaregiahotel.com); doubles from £34.
Tour operators: a 17-day Peru tour, with five days in the Amazon, starts at £2,493pp, including a stay at a jungle lodge, flights to Lima from 14 UK airports with KLM via Amsterdam, and plane transfers to Iquitos, with Bales Worldwide (0870 241 3208, www.balesworldwide.com). Or try Last Frontiers (01296 653000, www.lastfrontiers.com).
