Leaving Peru (again)
We left the Chachapoyas area for Tarapoto, a city 6 hours away by car and the gateway to the Amazon. Instead of doing a 3 or 4 day bus/boat combo to Iquitos in the Amazon, we opted to go with a cheap airline on a 1 hour flight from Tarapoto.
Iquitos is the largest city in the world with no road connections to the outside world. You can only arrive by boat or by plane. Many travellers come here to do a jungle trek or stay at a jungle lodge, but we opted to use Iquitos only as a jump off point for going much deeper into the Amazon. Today was spent doing admin, buying some supplies and hammocks (for the cargo boat rides) etc. We plan to take a boat tomorrow to the border with Colombia and Brazil from where we hope to travel down the Amazon for a few hundred kilometres to Tefe and Manaus. There is a specific ecolodge we want to visit in Tefe - very far from anything and everything else...
Culture shock: we read an article in a local tourist newspaper about day trips around Iquitos where 'you will be able to see and photograph huge trees logged out of the deep Amazon jungle...'
Iquitos is the largest city in the world with no road connections to the outside world. You can only arrive by boat or by plane. Many travellers come here to do a jungle trek or stay at a jungle lodge, but we opted to use Iquitos only as a jump off point for going much deeper into the Amazon. Today was spent doing admin, buying some supplies and hammocks (for the cargo boat rides) etc. We plan to take a boat tomorrow to the border with Colombia and Brazil from where we hope to travel down the Amazon for a few hundred kilometres to Tefe and Manaus. There is a specific ecolodge we want to visit in Tefe - very far from anything and everything else...
Culture shock: we read an article in a local tourist newspaper about day trips around Iquitos where 'you will be able to see and photograph huge trees logged out of the deep Amazon jungle...'
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