Our trip sailing up the Amazon, from Leticia in Colombia to Iquitos in Peru, was a doozy. We left our hostel in Leticia at 2am by taxi. We were taken across the border to Tabatinga on the Brasilian side and dropped by the river. Two surly men who we took to be our boatmen carried our bags to a tiny boat, and then demanded money, they were just the porters. We climbed aboard this tiny vessel and were ferried across the river, with only a small flashlight to light up the massive logs as they swung out of the darkness and into our path. We were then dropped at the so called 'dock', it was just gone 2.30 in the morning and we were standing in the pitch black, not entirely sure what was going on. Eventually someone started a generator and by the flickering fluorescent light we saw the boat we would be spending the next 12hrs aboard. When we booked the tickets I had imagined something that might have sailed the Mississippi at the turn of the century, a grand old paddle steamer, this looked like an old bus with rudders. Then our next problem arose, we needed immigration to stamp our passports on the way out of Colombia. This so called dock only had a shop that sold water and crisps. When we asked where was immigration we were quickly hustled onto another tiny vessel that once again headed off into the darkness with only a flashlight's beam to protect us from the giant logs floating downstream. At this point I went into denial, sitting in the absolute dark, with two men taking us off the heavens knows where, no light in sight at all, I had my eyes shut tightly and was honestly thinking "This cannot be happening". When after 5 minutes we reached another unseen shore, there was no pier, just a single plank of wood just above water that lead to a muddy bank. We followed our 'captain' up through the mud to a street, still no light. He found a house and started banging on the door as loudly as he could, after a few minutes a man who had clearly just been woken opened up and lit some candles. He stamped our passports, charged us a totally illegal US$10 per stamp and sent us back to the boat waiting in the dark.
When at 4am we finally clambered onto our floating bus we were just relieved to have made it on alive. As we chugged upstream and dawn broke we could see villages all along the river. Small children ran along waving and fisherman paddled their small hand carved boats. Many parts of the bank were falling in as the river has started its annual rise, and therefore began to change its path, sometimes by kilometers at a time.
Throughout the trip we were stopped by military several times, checking ID's, tickets, passports. But towards the end a group of men dressed in military black fatigues and wearing reflective aviators boarded and started searching bags. Not ours, they leave tourists alone, but the locals were under scrutiny. Much as we had no idea what was happening, it was curiously entertaining, to a point. They confiscated 2 boxes of chocolates and 5kgs of Brasilian beef. But it wasn't until one of them found 4 pairs of exactly the same shoe in a ladies bags that all hell broke lose. This tiny 4ft woman was screaming at one of these intimidating men, waving her finger in his face, and everyone else got involved. People pulled out their phones and started filming which only inflamed the situation. We cowered quietly hoping we weren't all going to be arrested and thrown into a Colombian prison. But after almost an hour sitting in the blazing sun, watching cockroaches stream out of the walls to escape the heat, we were given the all clear and arrived into Iquitos only 2 hrs after the scheduled time.
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