Pucallpa

Iquitos wasn’t our first Amazonian destination, before we headed for Pucallpa - located on the Ucayali river much further south. Johnattan has worked there and is also heavily involved in the local OSM group. At one point we even considered starting the Belem boat trip in Pucallpa, the Ucayali combines with the Marañon river way down nearer to Iquitos to form the Peruvian Amazon. But an estimated seven additional days on a boat to Iquitos was a bit too much, another time maybe. I was dealing with the change of atmosphere from the western side of the Andes, it poured with rain shortly after arrival and moving around in tuk tuk style transport to get anywhere made it feel like a different country.

It was only a two night stopover, but there was OSM activity on tha agenda as we had a drone mapping demonstration and small scale mapping party in the grounds of the local intercultural university. We also got out for a short trip on the Ucayali too. When I was loading datasets for my Amazonian mapping project I was thinking about appropriate styling for the rivers of the region. They always end up blue on the maps, but the Ucayali is chocolate brown! Pucallpa would be an interesting place for an Amazonian State Of The Map, particularly with it having an established local mapping community.