The Banana Boat

After five days in Pantoja, the cargo boat finally pushed off. We were all very excited to be going at last, but instead of going downriver towards Iquitos, the boat went upriver for most of the afternoon, picking up bananas and chickens from tiny communities on tributaries of the Napo. And that was how the first three days went – we’d move for about 20 minutes and stop for an hour, loading cargo from everyone who could wave at us from the shore. One afternoon we found ourselves passing a house we recognized as where we’d woken up that morning – we’d spent almost the whole day going up and down a tributary and were only just then starting downriver for the day. But none of us had any pressing business to attend to, so we shrugged at the delay and continued our card game.

Cards were indispensable for the trip. We spent a couple hours every day playing cards, as well as creating a backgammon board out of masking tape and seeds for pieces, and playing chess on my little handmade Incas vs. Conquistadores set. And reading. Lots of swinging in hammocks and reading. And watching the river go by or (as was more often the case in the first days) watching them load the boat. PETA would have a fit, watching this boat get loaded. Pigs were dragged to the boat by their hind legs, their noses making tracks in the dirt, and then thrown onto the metal floor to be confined below deck in a dark and increasingly stinky hold. Bulls, too, were manhandled onto the boat (though it took a lot of men – about 10/bull, pulling on ropes attached to his horns and legs) and then tied up in a tiny pen which at least was in the open air. And chickens in woven baskets kept flooding the boat, going everywhere, under peoples’ hammocks, on the roof, next to the bananas…did I mention the bananas? They were everywhere – they filled the hold (except the part that had chickens and pigs) and then the open part at the front of the boat in stacks 8 ft. high, and then finally up on the top deck with the passengers. Robin, the Dutch guy, calculated that there must have been at least 10,000 bunches of bananas on the boat.

We kept a weather eye out for river dolphins, and on the second day were rewarded by a spectacular show. We were stopped to pick up – you guessed it – bananas, at a junction of two rivers, and looked out to see five or six little grey dolphins and a pink dolphin splashing around in the current. It was a rare sight – normally grey dolphins are solitary, or so I hear, but here were a half dozen obviously playing together. For once we were glad the stop was especially long, because it gave us a long time to watch the dolphins.

After three days, we arrived in Santa Clotilde, a town about halfway to Iquitos. It was quite a shock – after three days of boat and another week before then of a tiny border town, Santa Clotilde was like a metropolis. They had roads – well, sidewalks, I guess – complete with the occasional motorcycle, and shops, and restaurants, and streetlights…it was overwhelming. We disembarked to walk around and restock on crackers and yogurt, and enjoy the fresh air, free of the smell of bananas and chickens.

We were halfway to Iquitos by map, but to our surprise, the trip was almost over. We had filled the boat to the gills, and so could make no more stops and the rest of the trip just flew by. The next thing we knew, we were entering the Amazon (exactly like the Napo except bigger) and the next evening we docked in Iquitos. We decided to spend one last night in our hammocks and save on hostel money – bad decision. At 4:30 the crew tramped up the stairs and began unloading the bananas and chickens from our deck and between the crowing roosters and the shouting men, none of us could get back to sleep. By 6 am we gave up and tramped off the boat for the last time, looking forward to exploring this legendary city.