Our border formalities were taken care of at the small frontier towns of Nuevo Rocafuerte on the Ecuadorian side and Pantoja on the Peruvian side. The one thing these towns had in common aside from the obvious was an abundance of giant handsome chickens. We were led past delapidated machinery rusting into overgrown grass to the police station, with its smashed windows and peeled paint. A shirtless man inside awoke from his slumber as we approached and donning a not so fresh tee shirt labelled "Policia", he led us to a small office to run the paperwork. Pantoja on the other hand contains a Peruvian army base and as we approached the passport office we were overtaken by a troop of sixteen year old soldiers carrying heavy firearms, grenade launchers, logs and a small monkey.
In Pantoja we bid Adios to our qualified guides and jumped in the canoe with Fernando the dentist, which is where things started to go wrong. Fernando was really just a boat driver and was only concerned with getting us to where we needed to go which involved manycontinuous hours of sitting in his canoe watching the trees go by.
Next on the agenda was to stop at a shaman´s house for some magical displays, supposedly popular among tourists. When we arrived at the intended town the people told us that the shaman had died a year and a half ago. While we were trying to figure out what sort of plague could have wiped out all the local shamen, Fernando took us further downriver to a lone thatched roof hut. We entered the hut and, with not so much as an introduction, Fernando left us to unload the boat. As it was, the four of us were left there with the shaman and his family, none of us knowing what was going on and all of us staring at each other in silence. Different people deal with these situations in different ways and Buddy, keen to change out of his smelly jungle clothes, dropped trou and waved his bare ass at the shaman who, laughing to himself, put a little more distance between himself and Buddy´s ass. The situation having lightened a little by blatant nudity, I tried with my broken spanish to introduce myself and the shaman in his broken spanish tried to reply, as to make this little cultural exchange more difficult the family spoke mostly Quechua and not spanish.
To this day I´m dubious as to whether he was a real shaman as they just seemed like a really poor family living in the middle of nowhere. The shaman himself wore only pants with a broken zipper and he had only two plants which he claimed to cure everything. As we were staying there, when we asked about the toilet, we were told it was anywhere and Tessa watched as a baby peed on its mother who didn´t so much as care to wipe it up. As we feasted on our dinner of cold beans, cold sardines and rice (the food had gone downhill by this stage) the family sat in the other hut with no food. We watched the next morning as the son licked the remains from the sardine can he had fetched from the rubbish.
Despite the difficult scene, I was intrigued to know more about the shaman´s family and how they lived and survived but our guide was not up to the task to tell us anything about them. After a short shaman cleansing ritual we put up our tents inside the hut to keep the mozzies at bay, and for all I know showing the family that we considered ourselves too superior to sleep in their company. In the morning we packed up as quickly as possible and after gifting some of our remaining food to the family, we got the hell out of there. I only hope that Fernando paid them decently for our incursion into their lives.
After an uneventful journey downriver we arrived in Santa Clotilde, the last stop before Iquitos and this was the point where the tour went sour. We were to take a public boat the next day to Iquitos, however Fernando calmly told us that there was no boat and that we were to be stuck in Santa Clotilde for at least another day. This didn´t bode too well for Elias and Buddy who had both booked flights from Iquitos and it showed us that no planning had gone into this stage of the journeyby the tour agency. To make matters worse, when we pressed Fernando further, he claimed that his contract with the agency had finshed when he delivered us to Sta Clotilde and he had no responsibility, but he could take us for an extra $400!! A three hour arguement ensued which had us traipsing around looking for other boats, ringing the owner of the tour agency who claimed equally no responsibility and generally embarrassing ourselves in front of the easy going townsfolk! On top of this we had to pay all our own food and lodgings despite the fact we were still on the tour. We had pretty well been ditched by the tour agency, a days travel from our destination. We eventually bargained with the misely Fernando and in the morning set off again in his canoe for a very tense and awkward trip to Iquitos.
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