November 5, 2006
Day 403
Laundry drying at an Amazonian house.
I woke up around midnight in the middle of a rainstorm. I had been sleeping on the floor with my sleeping bag and mattress, so I got soaked fairly quickly. The ceiling was waterproof, but there were no walls, only loosely hanging tarps, and the wind got so bad that the rain blew right in. We pulled over to the side of the river, but the storm was still powerful enough to soak everything. I scrambled to put my gear under my waterproof cover, then I climbed into my hammock, the only thing that didn't get wet, and waited for the storm to blow over. Apparently it rains frequently and heavily on the Amazon, but the storms pass quickly, which was indeed the case this time around.
Picture of kids.
We arrived at a town with a military post at 2:00 AM, but we couldn't leave until the entire boat was searched for drugs, and the officials refused to start searching until dawn. Finally they meticulously checked every single piece of cargo for several hours. When they finally got to where our backpacks were sitting, they saw that we were tourists and didn't bother searching us. We didn't get moving again until 9:00 AM.
It was another hot day where we took in our surroundings in the Amazon. We stopped at a lot more towns and constantly picked up and dropped off cargo. In the middle of the day, the engine cut out. We were out of gas. Luckily we had spare fuel tanks on board, and we were soon on our way again.
We got to Santa Rosa late in the afternoon. It's the easternmost point in Peru, and is joined by the border town of Leticia in Colombia and Tabatinga in Brazil. Santa Rosa is just a little settlement with a few hundred people, but tonight there was a party for all three border towns, so it was livelier than normal. Tomorrow we will head across the river to the Colombian side and finally obtain the coveted Brazilian visa.
