The Thursday night before Easter we flew to Iquitos, Peru where we had reservations to stay in a hostel that floats on the Amazon river. We were really excited about the hostel because it sounded, and looked from pictures, like such a cool place. When we arrived at the hostel we were greeted with a less than awesome situation. We hiked down the creaky steps to get from the street to the river, balanced-beamed across a very poorly made bridge and arrived at the hostel. It was more like we arrived at a bar, not a hostel. The entrance was actually a bar with music blasting. Aubrey and I stood in the bar with our suitcases for 5 minutes until this guy, Marcel, came to talk to us. There are two things you need to know about Marcel. 1. He owns the floating hostel and 2. he really likes alcohol. Marcel comes up to us completely drunk and tells us that we are not going to be able to stay in the room we reserved. Upon asking why not, he proceeds to tell us that the night before there was a hurricane and as a result our room has floated down the river. I asked him how he was going to get it back and he said that in the morning they would take 5 boats and tow it back. In the meantime we are going to stay in a dorm with a girl from DC. Aubrey and I agree and go into our temporary room to find two sets of bunk beds. We set our stuff down and notice that instead of professional sheets, we have little kids sheets. My bed has teddy bears and Aubrey's has bunnies. We look up and notice that the ceiling is falling apart and falling down on the beds. From the ceiling spiders are hanging down and landing on the bed. Running around our feet are cockroaches. We are already kind of grossed out by the ceiling and spiders and cockroaches and it is only made worse by the bathroom. We go in and see that the toilet water is brown. I flush it and more brown water comes out. After turning on the sink we notice that brown water is coming out of that also. Upon examination, we realize that water is being pulled up directly from the Amazon river. We are grossed out by the fact that we are expected to shower and brush our teeth with river water (can you say parasite), so we decided that we are going to walk to the store to get bottled water instead.
While we are at the store, we are trying to convince ourselves and each other that staying at this hostel isn't going to be so bad. Yeah our room got taken away by a hurricane and it might be extremely loud and dirty and falling apart, but it is still a cool idea that it floats and it is too late at night to do anything about it. We get back and realize just how loud the music actually is. It doesn't help that our room shares a wall with the bar. After getting back, we were standing outside of our room and notice a door that is connected to nothing. It is just sitting there without walls around it. After thinking about it, Aubrey says that she doesn't believe Marcel when it comes to our room. I asked her what she means and she points out that we are on a river in the middle of Peru; there is no possible way for a hurricane to form on the river. We realized that the door leading to nowhere used to be our room. I can't believe Marcel tore down our room to make a bar bigger! We both just started laughing at the absurdity of the entire situation. We notice that there is a section of the hostel about 20 feet from the bar that doesn't have any walls and the ceiling has holes in it. It was used as mainly storage for the beds that used to be in our reserved room, but there are hammocks hanging up over there. We go over and Aubrey teaching me how to lay in a hammock without falling out. We are laying there talking about how we are going to get any sleep with the music blasting and the bugs in our room, and she makes a joke that we should just sleep in the hammocks. I laughed, but then we both realized that sleeping 20 feet away from it all might actually be our best bet. The only problem is that we don't have any walls around us and no mosquito nets. We go back to our room and even though it is extremely hot and humid in the jungle, we dress in long sleeves, pants, and socks, trying to cover as much skin as possible. We then coat every inch of our body with bug repellent. We put all of our valuables in our backpacks because the room doesn't lock so we can't keep our stuff in there, grab our pillows and the top sheet off each bed, and head out to the hammocks.
We set up our "beds", put a bench in between the two hammocks and tie our backpack to it. We wanted to make sure that if anyone tried to take our stuff in the middle of the night, they would have to work at getting it free and hopefully we would wake up. Just to be extra safe though, we put our passports and our wallets in our pillowcases and slept on them. We then laid in the hammocks and attempted to sleep...unsuccessfully. The music was still so loud that we couldn't possibly sleep through it. By the time it stopped it was 4 am. We both sighed in relief that we might finally get some sleep, but then we hear a motor. Three minutes later we hear it again and both sit up. We see a motor boat going by full of people. Another three minutes goes by and another motor boat goes by again. This happened throughout the entire night. Iquitos can only be accessed by boat, so the way people get to and from the city is by taking a boat up and down the river. We could have slept through the noise of the boats motors, but remember we are on a floating hostel in hammocks. Every single time a boat goes by, our hostel bounces up and down with the waves, and Aubrey and I go swinging wildly back and forth. I spent the entire night flying back and forth, which was fun, but not conducive for sleeping. After awhile I finally fell asleep, but around 6 am was woken up by something growling and hitting me in the butt. I was freaked out by what jungle animal has decided to attack my backside, but curiosity took over and I peeked over the side of my hammock. I see two stray dogs play fighting underneath me, which is a relief that is isn't a strange animal, but I don't want to get in the middle of stray dogs so I just let them play. Finally Aubrey got sick of the growling and intervened by pulling them apart. The dogs stopped playing and Aubrey and I tried to go back to sleep, but the dogs have to be dogs and bark and jump in the river every time a boat goes by.
Aubrey and I weren't able to get back to sleep after this and decide that we need to spent our first day in the jungle searching for a new hostel because we can't do this for three more nights. We then pack up our "beds", deciding to leave our suitcases in the room in case we couldn't t find a new place to stay considering it is Easter weekend. We proceeded to spend the next two hours at an Internet cafe searching for a new hostel and jungle tours to take the following three days. We ending up at a hostel more inland in Iquitos, found tours to go on the following Saturday and Sunday, and went back and got our stuff from the floating hostel. The floating hostel was not too happy about us cancelling our reservation, but it seemed like it happened to them a lot. The hotel we found to say in seemed like a 5-star resort in comparison to the floating hostel. It probably wasn't that great, but we were just so relieved that it was quiet and clean that we just spent the rest of the weekend thanking God for providing us with a new place to stay. We were so tired from our lack of sleep that the first full day we had in Iquitos was not much fun. Once we got our new room and took a 4 hour nap, we were in much better shape. Although it was an extremely long night, it might be one of the coolest places I have ever woken up at. The next three days went much more smoothly. I'll post more about my adventures in the jungle later this week.
Hope you all are doing wonderfully. I love you all.
Andrea
OMG, Andrea! What a wild, fun, and crazy adventure! I'm sure some parts were not too fun at the time, but it makes a GREAT story! Great pics too!
ReplyDeleteNicolette
Crazy! Good story for later, though! :)
ReplyDelete