Iquitos Peru and the Amazon

Feeding young manatees at the manatee rescue center

Iquitos is located on the convergence of a couple of rivers; the main one being the Amazon itself. It is reachable from mainland Peru only by boat or airplane. While traveling through Ecuador, I was close to the Amazon, but never really reached it. I somewhat regreted that decision. While in Huaraz, I met a couple of people that were going to Iquitos and they told me that the trip was only $130 round trip from Lima. So I decided I would make up for my decision in Ecuador.

The Amazon from Iquitos

Iquitos is a fairly large town for a place reachable only by air or water. It has a fair amount of traffic dominated by motortaxis (tuk tuks). I think this is due to the fact that it is not as easy to get cars into Iquitos.

Jungle Tours or Day Trips

Many of the tourist books suggested that the way to do Iquitos is to do two or three day jungle tours. On these tours, a guide will take you a couple hours out of Iqutos into or close to one of the national parks. You will spend a couple of days hiking and checking out wildlife. While I kind of liked the idea, I kept reading reviews from people on different tours that made me feel that the lodges were somewhat uncomfortable with an abundance of mosquitoes. Also there were a lot of mixed reviews about the quality of information provided by the quides. Given these two items, I chose to stay in an air conditioned hotel in Iqutos and do day trips.

While I think my choice was pretty good, I think a better decision would have been to also rent a motorcycle while I was there (did not think of this until I left). Then I could have ridden to or close to a couple of the national parks and taken a boat from there. I could have done it on my own schedule. I will get it right eventually.

Manatee Rescue Center and the Zoo

One of the first things I did was visit the manatee rescue center and then the zoo (these are separated by about 2 km). Here we saw some rescued baby manatees as well as a baby otter. The manatees will be placed into the wild when they are old enough / healthy enough to fend for themselves. There were some manatees under 18 months and a few manatees two years old and over. We had an opportunity to feed them, which was quite enjoyble.

Baby manatee under 18 months

Some of the older manatees wanting to be fed

Feeding the manatees

The visit to the zoo was also pretty interesting, even though it was just a zoo. Here they had many of the animals that were from the jungle in the Amazon, but that you would not likely see on a day or two hike in the jungle itself.

Chances of encountering her in the jungle are pretty slim

Butterfly Rescue

Similar to the Manatee Rescue, the butterfly rescue was working on restoring a number of butterfly species whose populations have been substantially diminished due to loss of habitat.  They were working with 17 species of butterfly. They also had a few rescue animals some of which would be released back into the jungle. This was a fun visit and worth the time.

This butterfly's defense was to look like an owl

These caterpillars were as big as my hand

This guy gets fed live food often as it is possible that he will be released.

Attempt to go to Monkey Island

I attempted to go down stream to a monkey rescue center, however, I could not get through to them on the phone. The monkey rescue was two hours down stream by boat. I did not want to go all the way down there without getting in touch with someone, so I ended up just taking a ride on the Amazon instead.

That boat was carrying some old growth forest. Those were some very wide diameter logs.

Port Nanay

The local water taxis

Ayahuasca

One of the big attractions to Iquitos seemed to be Ayahuasca tourism. Ayahuasca is some kind of cooked Amazonian plants. Apparently, it provides some kind of psychodelic experience. Additionally, it is supposed to cleanse the body. People go on "tours" where they visit a shaman who gives them the ayahuasca and then the go on a spiritual journey. I did not really have any desire to participate the Ayahuasca tourism, This was especially the case, since most of the Ayahuasca tourists reminded me of the grunge crowd from college days. My spiritual journey would probably end up with me yelling at them to take a frickin shower.