Snapshots from the jungle, part 1: River boat

The first phase of my Amazonian adventure was a three-day river boat ride from Yurimaguas to Iquitos, the largest city in the world that's not accessible by road. (We won't count the 34 hours of travel on four different buses that it took me to get from Cajabamba to Yurimaguas.) Our watercraft was the Bruno VI, a three-decker cargo boat the size of a small ferry.

Deck one was for cargo, but deck two was filled with passengers. The Bruno operates on a BYOH (bring your own hammock) basis, and then everybody strings up their home-away-from-home in every spare sliver of space. Jess, Nick, Chris and I initially put our hammocks up in the small covered patch of the open-air third deck, but when a very windy and rainy thunderstorm woke us up at 4:30am the first night, that was the end of that. Slightly soaked, we moved down into the thick of things for the rest of the trip.

The view from my hammock at any given moment pretty much looked like this: wide brown water, pure green jungle, and cloud-spotted skies.

But every so often we'd pull into a tiny town to load and unload cargo for about twenty minutes, or we'd see other (smaller) boats pass alongside.

One of the bigger towns - all the houses made of wood with leaf roofs

Banana boat!

Our boat days were at the mercy of the ship's early-bird meal schedule: 6:30 breakfast, 11:30 lunch, 4:30 dinner. The Bruno also operates on a BYOT (bring your own tupper) basis, so all my meals were eaten out of this same orange bowl:

Aside from mealtimes, we spent our days swinging in our hammocks, reading lots of books, playing an ongoing rotation of casino-euchre-hearts card games, hanging out with our best three-year old friend Zoe, and just watching the river roll by. It was a relaxing couple of days, and definitely an interesting experience to see how jungle travel works in Peru.

Zoe's hammock was right next to ours, and she found us fascinating: our water bottles, our books, our card games, she just wanted to be part of it all

Amazon sunset