The First Boat - Iquitos To The Triple Frontier

The boat from Iquitos was to be our sole concession to relative comfort on the river, foreigners have to pay a higher price for the ferry than locals, but the benefit was to be on the upper deck with more space, and an outside area at the back. There are faster boats doing this stretch of the river, but you are stuck inside the boat the whole time with very limited views of the river. Ours was the middle option between the three day slow boat and the fast service, and finally we were on our way down the Amazon.

Leaving in mid-afternoon we had about 3 hours of daylight left for river watching. The first proper sunset I had seen in Peru lit up the river before dark. And then we had a glorious full moon ahead of the boat, meaning that we had some visibility all night long. The ferry is quite modern and relatively fast, we even had a TV showing Peru playing Chile in a World Cup qualifier.

I slept on and off, partly because of trying to sleep stretched out on seats that weren’t uncomfortable but which were not designed for sleeping. Some of that time I spent watching the moonlt silhouette of the forest as we made our way down river. All those months of thinking and planning the adventure, and here we were. We were expecting an 18 hour journey, but in the end it was nearer to 15. Early morning and we were almost at Santa Rosa, the Peruvian river island on the triple frontier.