We Can't Stop Here! This is Parrot Country!

Tabatinga wasn't a super attractive town. It had a bit of frontier bustle, which was helped by the fact that it was positively swarmed with motorcycles, scooters and tuktuks (shipping in larger vehicles isn't easy and the longest theoretical road journey you can make in the area is 32km, so there's a limited market for larger vehicles).  But more than that it was dusty, potholed and pretty utilitarian.

Fortunately there were two other towns, indeed two other COUNTRIES to visit within a few minutes of the docks where we disembarked from our week-long boat trip from Manaus.

In this corner of the world, the southernmost point in Colombia, the easternmost point in Peru and a far western bit of Brazil all meet up.  Locals and visitors alike are welcome to wander around the three as they please.  Indeed, it's reported that the border officers will get annoyed if you try to formally enter or exit each country more than once.

Sarah and I walked up the busy main street of Tabatinga until it turned into the slightly less busy main street of Leticia, Colombia.  We were immediately charmed by the place.  It was tidier, less dusty and clearly had more of a tourism focus than Tabatinga.  Where the signs in the shops weren't slick and modern they were hand painted and charming.  And traffic didn't seem to be in quite as much of a rush as back in Brazil.

I dropped Sarah off in a park near the town centre and spent nearly an hour wandering around looking for a place to stay.  When I got back I also had a quick look online and discovered vacancies at a place that had looked quite nice but who said they were full when I popped in in person.  The price sounded right, so back we went into a comfy air conditioned room, excited at the prospect of sleeping in a bed for the first time in eight nights.

Before that, however, there was plenty of daylight left.  We decided to get the administrative basics out of the way.

First was a return to Brazil to get our exit stamp.  We arrived a bit early (actually I think the office opened a little late).  But in what was to become a regular occurrence for the rest of the afternoon, some of our fellow passengers on the boat from Manaus were waiting there, so we had friendly company for a half hour or so of waiting.  While we were waiting some of them told us of a fast boat to Iquitos the next morning that cost a mere 80 Peruvian Soles instead of the 250 or so we'd expected.  This would make our visit to Leticia and Santa Rosa a bit rushed, and it sounded possibly too good to be true, but the family in question was Peruvian, so we hoped to be able to join them on the trip.

This took a fair bit of rigaramole with going to a Colombian ATM, changing Colombian Pesos to Peruvian Soles, then finding the small motorboats that took passengers across the river (now called the Amazon again, since we'd left Brazil!) By the time this was all sorted out it was almost 17:00, so we needed to rely on the Peruvian immigration office either being open late and/or running on official Peru time (an hour earlier) rather than the unofficial local (Brazilian time) that most things in the three towns did.

As we were hopping in our little boat the driver (who, being in a hurry, we didn't argue with over being charged 66% more than normal for the trip) allayed our fears and told us that the immigration office was open until 18:00 Peru time.

The lady at Peruvian immigration was very pleasant and professional. Though the Santa Rosa border post obviously didn't see too many Kiwi visitors, as she first looked at Sarah's passport, then looked a little uncertain, then asked "is this an OFFICIAL passport?" I'm still unclear on whether she was asking whether it was an NZ diplomatic passport or whether it was actually issued by the real government of a real country.

With that sorted out there was only one more minor hurdle to clear.
The office was very tidy, with lots of snappy new signs, including one that read "¡Hagamos Perú libre de sarampión!" or something to that effect. "Let's make Peru measles-free!"

I'd had an MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccination before leaving, but as Sarah had had hers when she was young she did not. As such it wasn't on her vaccination record. Lacking this evidence the immigration officer and the border post nurse politely asked her to have the jab right there an then.  It was free, and done with a fresh, single use syringe, but it's still no fun to have an unexpected stabbing!

On our way back to the docks we once again ran into some of our Tabatinga boatmates. This was the Peruvian mom and teenage son who were headed in the same direction as us.  On hearing we hadn't bought our boat tickets yet they suggested we return to the town centre with them and they'd show us where to buy tickets for a fast boat to Iquitos for just 80 Soles.  This appealed as:
A. We hadn't been able to find anywhere to buy a slow boat ticket yet.
B. They supposedly cost almost that much anyway.
C. We were actually starting to worry about how much (or little) time we'd have once we hit dry land in Peru
D. After spending 8 days in our hammocks from Manaus to Tabatinga we had frankly had enough of slow boat travel for the moment.

As it turned out the service was a subsidised one and the 80 Sole fare was for Peruvians and Colombians only.  For foreigners it was a hefty 220, but we decided to buy the tickets for a Friday morning (two days hence) departure anyway.

By the time we walked and boated back to Leticia we were pretty tired, sweaty and dirty. It was a real treat to share a big, cold bottle of (Colombian! Made in Leticia!) guarana pop and lie in an air conditioned bedroom for the evening with only the briefest foray outside to have a fast and cheap roasted chicken dinner at the Pollos Cali half a block down the street.

The next day was our day to take a good look around Letícia.  We started with a stroll around the town centre, which was a mixture of tourist businesses and more upmarket local ones.  All of it was colourful and tidy. Particularly nice, and lined with grand old shade-giving trees as it led down to the waterfront, was Calle 8 (charming town yes, original street names, no.)

At the river we popped across a temporary wooden footbridge to a residential area comprised entirely of wooden buildings raised up on stilts against the high water season when residents would have to boat over to town and, when the river was particularly high, to their neighbours' houses as well.

Back on the other side of the creek running through Letícia was a similar stilt-house neighbourhood that had an alternative way of getting around in high water.  A series of raised (also on stilts) walkways connected all of the homes with one another and with the main part of town.  The main thoroughfare was a concrete structure, over a kilometre long, complete with suspension bridges over larger streams and wide enough to drive a small car along.

The return trip along these elevated walkways left us back at the Mercado Central.  It wasn't huge, but rather surprisingly, was devoted pretty much entirely to everyday goods and produce for the local populace.

And seeing as it was around lunchtime, we headed upstairs to the "food court" section to eat.  There were a series of tiled kitchen stalls, each with a variety of pots and pans on the go.  We eventually settled on a pescado assado (grilled whole fish). Complete with rice, beans, a fried plantain, fresh chillis, a glass  of panela (sweet, slightly cinammon-y cold drink) and a bowl of salty-spicy tomato salsa.
Complete with a banana milkshake from the stall next door, just 8000 Colombian Pesos (under NZD4).
The lady doing the cooking was super friendly and cheerful as well, welcoming us to Letícia and asking about our past and future travels in the region.

After lunch we took a bit of an indoor rest from the afternoon heat. Despite our tolerance of it having improved after more than two months of never being more than five degrees from the equator, we still weren't 100% acclimated yet.

Once things had cooled off a bit we went out to see what is probably Letícia town's number one tourist attraction: Santander park near sunset.

It is a nice park, no doubt about that. And a fun one too, with a 2010 renovation having added flourishes of cartoon-like decoration featuring the natural and cultural wonders of the surrounding forest. But the real attraction lies in the park's non human residents returning home for the evening. Small and medium-sized parrots.  Lots of them.  LOTS of them.

When we arrived around 17:15 there was already a riot of squawking in the palm trees that seemed to be the little green parrots' first choice of roosting spot.  The fronds bounced up and down under the weight of five or six or more of the most common or smallest ones.  Or positively staggered under the weight of even a couple of the bigger, much less common type.

More and more kept landing as we sat and watched.  In flights of ten or twenty or fifty, or later a few hundred, they'd find an open spot and settle down for the night.  We estimated around 100,000 parrots in total.  It reminded me a little of the swifts returning home at the same time behind Kaieteur Falls, in that every time you thought "surely that's the last of them," you'd look up in the sky and see another cloud approaching.  Except here instead of disappearing behind the falls, they sat in the trees around you squawking out evening greetings to one another.  It started out loud, but just grew and grew until I was certain I'd have tinnitus on leaving the park for the night.
The parrots in Santander Park are probably the loudest animal sound I've ever heard.  And astonishingly, several people were trying to make phone calls while sitting in the park.  Some of them were tourists along the lines of "just listen to this!"  But I'm pretty sure some others had just chosen a really bad place to communicate with their friends or families.  It was probably JUST possible to make yourself understood, as the parrot noise was so much higher in pitch than normal human voices.

Luckily, I've just moved to another blogging app that (as you may have noticed) makes it easier to add photos in the middle of entries (and also hopefully doesn't occasionally irretrievably eat posts when I try to post or save them). It also allows me to post videos, so you can share in the return of the parrots to Letícia right near its most raucous.  Because this is one instance where an image alone wouldn't really do it justice.

Our final day in the tri-border area was spent mostly across the Amazon in Santa Rosa, Peru.  After changing our final Reais into Peruvian Soles, and a return visit to our previous day's lunch spot in the market we headed down the river and crossed for the final time.  This time it was in a smaller, more rustic motor canoe that, with three people and two backpacks aboard had less than 10cm between the water and the tops of the gunwales, less than I would've liked, especially when crossing the wakes of larger boats. But I guess we'd seen even more heavily laden vessels make the trip successfully, and we arrived all in one piece and pretty much dry.

Santa Rosa was quite a bit smaller than the Brazilian or Colombian towns across the river. It also looked noticeably poorer, with (I think) only four or so buildings other than wooden stilted structures.

But once you got away from the hot, dusty and dirty dock area, the main road (wide pathway really) through the town had been recently and colourfully paved.  And the people were universally friendly (on an afternoon walk through the more rural part of town a bunch of middle aged men hailed me, asking where I was from and, laughing, if I wanted to join them in smoking some marijuana.

The centre of Santa Rosa seemed to be full of Restaurantes Turistico.  Far more of them than could possibly be justified by the number of tourists in evidence.
Similarly, there were dozens upon dozens of Motocars (essentially a 125 or 150cc motorbike with a cabin for two or three passengers welded on to the back).  Even if no one in Santa Rosa ever walked anywhere there seemed to be too many of these.

There were only three hotels that we could see, but we most definitely had to stay in one, as our boat was scheduled to depart at the unlikely hour of 03:00.

We spent a decent portion of the afternoon walking every metre of road on the island trying to divine where the boat would be leaving from, but even after having returned to the place we'd bought the tickets the best we could manage was "come back here around 01:30 and that will give you plenty of time to get there for boarding at 02:00.  There were always the Moto-cars I guess.   Presuming, of course, that there were any about at 01:30. The folks at our (friendly, comfy and amusingly decorated, by the way) hotel assured us that there would be.  So there was nothing for it but to go out and have a beer and another delicious grilled fish dinner in town, then get to sleep as early as possible.

I don't think I've mentioned yet that the fish in the Amazon is delicious.  Big, meaty and without the kind of "muddy" flavour that lake fish often have, Amazon River fish of all (regularly eaten) types are undoubtedly the most uniformly tasty freshwater fish I've ever had (though we hadn't yet brought ourselves to eat the large algae eaters that we regularly saw on the grill up and down the river.  They looked too tough to eat, plus they were just too cute, even cooked).

My bedtime was slightly delayed.  Not by the music at the (also inexplicably numerous) discos on the island, but by the realization that we didn't know whether our boat was departing at 03:00 official Peru time, or 03:00 Brazil time, which Santa Rosa unofficially runs on and is an hour ahead.

It was worth the half hour return trip to the place we'd bought the tickets, as they confirmed (as clearly as I could manage... "02:00 Lima time, right? 7 hours from now. Not Brazil time, correct?") that it was Peru time, thus giving us an extra hour to sleep.

When we woke we discovered that there were indeed Moto-cars around.  And unfortunately that our hotel folks were correct in telling us that we'd be charged 20 Soles (about NZD8) for the trip to the dock.  Given the size of the island there was no way this was a reasonable price.  It turned out to be about a ten or fifteen minute ride.  But given that it was ten or fifteen minutes on a dirt track through fields of tall corn that we never would have found on our own I suppose we did get some value out of it...

There was already a queue to get aboard when we arrived at 01:45.  The ferry was a handsome vessel, with two air conditioned decks of comfy leather seats and plenty of room for checked bags.  Poking around the boat during the journey we learned that it had originally been a Norwegian passenger ferry, built in 2010 and obviously sold on quite recently.

After a good solid nap (or perhaps just a continuation of the night's sleep) to start the trip, meals were served at our seats and we had plenty of time to look out the windows or head out to the exterior deck as we zipped along the river at over 40km/h.

Stops were relatively few and were quick, just loading and unloading passengers.  So the whole trip to Iquitos took about 14 hours instead of the 70-80 hours that the cargo boats make the journey in.

On the faster boat tucked away inside an air conditioned cabin it was much easier to cruise up the river disconnected from its sights and sounds.  But generally the forest on the Peruvian Amazon seemed denser and darker.  It was broken less often by towns, but when they came many of them looked bigger (and poorer, but also tidier) than the river towns in Brazil had been.

Around 17:30 we arrived at the biggest of them all, Iquitos.  Our next stop and home for the next few days.