Iquitos day 1

Today is a get acquainted with the city day.

I came to Iquitos without doing my homework. I came thinking it was a small river side town where I could get a slow boat to Leticia, Columbia.

So I was surprised yesterday coming through all the traffic on the way to the hostel. Then doing a little reading I find out that Iquitos is actually huge with close to 500,000 people living here. Blew my mind.

I have or am including some street view pictures that show a lot of tuktuk and motorbikes. I talked to someone today that said there were over 30,000 tuktuks in the city.

My first stop today was to locate the marina were the slow boats dock that go to Leticia. The tuktuk driver didn't fully understand where I wanted to go, so he dropped me off too soon. After refering to my ever present google maps, I found a direction to start walking. I first came to a marina that appeared to be mostly cargo boats.

I then went back to my phone to get more information on which marina to cargo/passenger boats docked. I found that the marina I wanted to go was only about a 10 minute walk down a dirt side road from where I was at.

The slow boats dock at Puerto Masusa.

When I arrived, I saw a whole line of boats, all appeared to be cargo/passenger boats.

What I also didn't realize from my lack of research was that Iquitos was not the end of the line for the river boats, but only another midpoint. Going further south west from Iquitos is the city of Yurimaguas, the closest  city to Iquitos that is accessible by roads. This is where vast majority of the cargo is loaded onto boats for it's journey to Iquitos.

It is too early for me to buy a ticket. This is done of the day that you plan to board a boat. Right now I have no idea when that will be. I will figure that out the day befor I decide to leave. That could be anywhere between a couple of days for a week from now.

From the marina, I caught another tuktuk ride to the Museo di Culturas Indigenas Amazónicas. The entry to the museum was free. Here I joined a group in progresss to view the many life size status of indiginous people of the amazon. There are about 60 indigenous communties in the Peruvian amazon. Many of them represented by the statues in this museum. The more heavily clothed tribes are from the cooler mountainous regions. And the sparsely or no clothed tribes from lower elevations. Several of these tribes practiced what we not refer to headhunting and cannibalism.