Living in Peru : your everyday companion

A journey along the Amazon is the perfect excuse to immerse our senses in the natural world of this remote region of Peru. Walter H. Wust, a tireless traveller and a frequent contributor to Rumbos, shares with us an extract from the journal of his voyage along this great river.

Day 1

Iquitos, seven thirty in the morning. My eyes fall first on intense shades of yellow and green, followed by the purples and reds of the heaps of fresh fruit that Doña Luisa sells from the sidewalk on Pebas street, a few meters from the entrance to our hotel.

I wander through streets busy with motorcycle taxis and filled with the aroma of damp earth, guided only by the images of this tropical dawn as they crowd in upon me.

The sky-blue Portugese ceramic tiles of the big houses along the Tarapacá promenade come next, followed by the brown palm-thatched roofs of the floating houses on the Itaya river, the blazing greens of trees along Sargento Lores Avenue, and the blues and yellows of the old San José college, from whose windows the faces of a dozen curious students appear.

We are on a bus with wooden sides and seats like church pews, on our way to the local dock. There the vessel which is to be our home for the next nine days is waiting for us.

Marcelita is the name with which the boat’s owner, Renzo Fontanella, christened her. Born in Spain, Fontanella has been living in the Loretan jungle for the last fifteen years, ever since a providential bout of typhoid changed his life.

The Marcelita comprises forty-five tons of steel and cedar gracefully distributed along its forty-nine meter length. Two powerful Perkins engines propel us along smoothly while the sun falls like lead on the chocolate-colored waters of the Amazon.

We are sailing towards the frontier, lulled by a breeze from the south. Round clouds hang above us in a blue sky.

The immense brown of the river and the green edge of the forest mark the limits of our field of vision. We might be the Spanish explorer Francisco de Orellana or the Frenchman Charles-Marie de la Condamine, indigenous forest dwellers heading to the market in Belén, or even timber merchants.

Everything which ventures deep into the forest along this great river is converted, for a time, into something smaller and somehow less significant.

Our first day on the Amazon draws to a close. Now the moon emerges to rule until dawn, reverberating in the waves that flow from the bow and lulling us with her magic.

Day 2

Today we wake in the land of the Yaguas. Santa Lucía is the name of the native village that receives us under a radiant morning sun. Its homes, built on stilts and covered with high, palm-thatched roofs, are arranged in a row along the banks of the Ambiyacu river, which is a small tributary of the Lower Amazon.

There are men, women and children. Canoes and rafts, bananas and heaps of ungurahui. Hairless dogs, and monkeys hanging from children's hair as they observe us intently.

Soon I find myself in the shady interior of the maloka, the communal hut where the villagers meet to dance. The light is filtered between the sticks that form the building’s walls, transforming the painted bodies of its occupants into strange black and white forms.

The day has kept another even more intense and colorful surprise for us. In Pevas, a town built from clay and palm fronds sometime in the 18th century, when it was a Jesuit mission, a man from Tumbes who looks like a truck driver created the most wonderful world of forms and colors imaginable.

His name is Francisco Grippa, and he lives in a kind of wooden, tin-roofed castle at the top of a hill overlooking the Ambiyacu river.

Nothing else around here contains more of the forest, of its strength, life and nature, than this man’s paintings. He invites us in to admire the dozens of paintings that decorate his house-cum-workshop-cum-gallery.

He offers us cold beer, which we drink as we listen to a Jazz CD he brought recently from California, where he goes twice a year in order to restock one of his galleries. I say one of his galleries, because he also has outlets for his art in Lima and Iquitos.

Grippa is friendship and freshness. He is not pretentious, as many others who call themselves artists and turn their backs on the world tend to be. Here, on a balcony over the Amazon, everything seems peaceful and truthful.

I try to capture it all with my eyes. Scarlet macaws, silver-toothed piranhas, hummingbirds dancing colorfully, terrible storms at dusk, all the luxuriance of the tropics painted in oils, acrylics and watercolors.

However, we must eventually leave. An embrace, promises to return with more time to spare, and I leave with a painting under my arm, a gift which I still do not fully understand. Grippa and Pevas, the Yaguas and, once again, the red and blue even more intense than ever. That is this part of the Amazon.

Day 3

The dawn surprises us anchored in the shade of some ancient flowering amasisis trees. The orange flowers attract a band of parrots who, between gulps of nectar, wake the last sleepers aboard the Marcelita with their cries.

We are on the island of Santa Rosa, on the banks of the Amazon, in the most easterly town in Peru. Raised on stilts, the houses remind us that in the rainy months this town is inundated by the river.

A few minutes by launch separate us from the color and happiness of other frontier towns. The Colombian town of Leticia and Tabatinga in Brazil, separated by a single street but united by shared smiles, a verdant aroma and the unhurried life common in these latitudes.

Time means nothing here. Perhaps the easiest way to spot outsiders is the way they look at their watches and hurry about their business. Cold beer, Colombian music and motorcycles endlessly circling the plaza, where old men rest in the afternoon shade.

The sun shines down on the Yavarí river. The water loses its chocolate color and for a few minutes is dyed red and orange by the light of dusk.

The moon, enormous and red, appears from behind the trees. Hordes of insects descend and force us to retreat to our air conditioned bunks.

Today was hot and humid, a day when clouds formed above our heads, producing rain which just made the atmosphere even heavier than before. A typical Amazonian day.