That one time in the Amazon...

You know those days when something crazy is happening and in the middle of it you look around at everyone you’re with and say, wow, when we get out of this situation, this is going to make a great story? Well here is my great story. It’s about being held hostage in the Peruvian Amazon.

This past weekend my program took us to Iquitos, the only city in the huge department of Loreto in northern Peru. Loreto is so big in comparison to the other departments (same as states in the US) because it is all jungle and the population density is very low. The city is only accessible by plane or by river because it is so far away from everything else, so we had to fly from Cusco to Lima and Lima to Iquitos. It was so different than Cusco that it almost didn’t feel like Peru to me. The Amazon River was only a few blocks away from our hotel! And wow, this place was very very hot and humid, kind of a shock after high altitude Cusco. The most popular forms of transportation are motorcycle or mototaxi, basically a motorcycle with a covered seat that fits two people attached to the back. There are also buses but I would guess that at least 80% of the vehicles in the city were motorcycles, aka traffic is extremely loud and unpredictable. But enough about the city and on to the real story.

One of the main activities during our time in Iquitos was a visit to a village of the Cocama people called 2 de Mayo, one of 54 Cocama villages located on the Río Marañón (one of the two main headwaters of the Amazon; the Amazon officially starts being called the Amazon when it passes through Iquitos). Sunday morning at 6am we left Iquitos on a bus to drive two hours to Nauta, a port town on the edge of the river. We waited about an hour and left Nauta with the group of 25 students, three program staff, and a couple people from an NGO split between four different boats. Every boat except ours had some sort of engine problem within the first few hours and the captain of my boat, evidently the resident motor repair expert, had to keep going back to help the other captains fix their motors.

I was in a boat with Donaldo, the assistant academic director, and nine girls from my program. We thought we lucked out because our motor hadn’t broken down at all so far, but after stopping for a bathroom break at a random field filled with cow patties on the side of the river, the engine wouldn’t start. All the other boats had gone ahead so we waited about two and a half hours for the captain to fix the motor. By the time it was fixed around 3pm, we were already way behind the original schedule for the day. We were supposed to have arrived in 2 de Mayo at 10am to hang out with the community and do interviews before lunch around 1pm. So our biggest worry at this point was that we had missed lunch. We had some snacks like packaged cookies on our boat but since we had eaten breakfast at 5:30am we were still really hungry.

So we keep going in our boat and about an hour later pull up to a small community where our captain shouts to a man, where is 2 de Mayo? Which is when we realize, we’ve already come at least four hours and you don’t even know where we are going?! The man points in the opposite direction where we just came from, great. So we turn around and go through a little side part of the river instead. Everything seems promising, we are finally getting close, but all of a sudden we run out of gasoline! We kind of coast up to the shore and the captain and his friend tie the boat up to a stick stuck into the riverbank and literally run off without saying anything else to us. So we are left waiting for them to come back, hopefully with more gasoline so we can finally make it to 2 de Mayo and eat lunch.

Soon after we realize that we have happened to dock in a part of the river with about 20 mosquitoes per cubic foot of air. Forrealz. There are more mosquitoes than I have ever seen before. All of us are going crazy slapping ourselves all over to get them off our face, our arm, our neck, and all of a sudden Donaldo decides to jump in the river and go swimming. Because the mosquitoes aren’t letting up and we don’t know how long we’ll be waiting, everyone gradually overcomes their fears of piranhas and jumps in the river and we all have this moment like, whoa we are swimming in the Amazon! And our boat driver has abandoned us and we don’t have any gasoline but it’s all good because we are swimming in the Amazon River. But then one of my friends finds a leech on her hand and we all scramble out of the water and back on the boat and get dressed, soaking our clothes and slapping away the mosquitoes again.

It starts getting windy and rainy like it’s about to start pouring but we see a guy on a canoe passing us so we say, help, help! and he comes over and ties his canoe to our boat. So of course we think he’s tied up his canoe because he’s going to help us out. And then a really long canoe with at least ten men in it pulls up and ties up on the other side of the boat and we are surrounded. At this point we are under the impression that they are rescuing us by towing us to their village, so we are all laughing and joking around and passing around lollipops and cookies and singing for them.

A few minutes later we arrive at the village and see hundreds of people rushing down toward the riverbank to greet us. But this is where we kind of realize that the guys weren’t exactly rescuing us. It was more that they had gotten upset about something and didn’t really want us to be at the village or on their part of the river. So Donaldo talks very briefly with the village leader and tells us that we are going to go to someone’s house to wait for a little while. So all ten of us gringas, watched very closely by everyone in the village, go over to this random house and go up to the second floor to await our fate.

Although the house has an open front on the second floor, I can’t really see what’s happening so I have to rely on what I hear to know what’s going on. And unfortunately I hear people yelling, which is definitely not a good sign. These community discussions go on for a while and we are all waiting quietly, hoping that Sonia, the academic director who was on a different boat that already arrived in 2 de Mayo, will somehow find out that we are here being held hostage by a very angry community. I’m still not exactly sure how Sonia found out, I think she sent out a search boat to look for us and the captain saw our boat, but she shows up all of a sudden and Donaldo goes down to meet her and talk to the community and explain who we are and what we are doing in their community.

Again, we are still stuck in the house and can’t really figure out what’s going on. It appears that people are making a lot of speeches and are maybe less angry but it’s hard to be sure. Finally, maybe an hour and a half after we arrived in the community, Sonia and Donaldo come back to the house where we are waiting and Sonia is super relieved to see all of us since she had no idea where we were for the last five hours. We debrief about what happened: apparently the Cocama communities are very distrustful of gringos because an Argentinian petroleum company called PlusPetro has been contaminating the river with heavy metals for over ten years. This is really bad for the community because the river is their only water source and their main food source. There was an agreement signed a few years ago between all the 54 communities that they wouldn’t let in any tourists, and we were only able to visit because the president was cool with us being students who could potentially help them get international support for their campaign against the oil company. So where this all went wrong was that the president informed all the communities in the area that we would be coming but somehow forgot to mention it to the one village where we ended up. They detained our boat because they didn’t know why we were there and were suspicious that as gringos, we might be connected with the oil company. They were upset after seeing the other boats from our group pass by earlier so when they saw us they thought, finally we can do something about this.

After hearing an explanation of the situation from Sonia, we understand that the community is not actually mad at us but mad at the president of the Cocama communities because he didn’t follow the rules about bringing in tourists and didn’t inform them when and why we would be passing by their village to get to 2 de Mayo. We wait in the house with Sonia and Donaldo while the community discusses the issue with the president. At this point it’s about 6pm and starting to get dark. We are all calm and relatively relaxed because we now know that we are safe with both of the program directors but we start to get worried when we start doing mental calculations about how long it is going to take to get back to Iquitos. And at this point it is painfully obvious that we are going to be taking the boat back in the dark. And the boat has no lights on it. Hmmm. Not good.

The discussion between the president and the community finally winds down and Sonia asks the boat we arrived in to go back to 2 de Mayo (which turns out to be only ten minutes away!), pick up the other half of the group, and come back to the community where we are waiting so we can all go back to Nauta together. It sounds simple enough but we ended up waiting about two hours more because all the people from my program who were in 2 de Mayo were really confused about what to do. Apparently the boat captains weren’t helping matters because they were saying weird things, like telling them that “someone” said they needed to leave right now and that my group that had been detained was already back in Nauta. Not true. So we are waiting, waiting, waiting, getting progressively hungrier because we still haven’t eaten lunch, let alone dinner. Finally Sonia calls 2 de Mayo on the community phone to tell the rest of the group where we all are and that it’s OK to leave and come meet us so we can all leave together safely.

They finally leave 2 de Mayo but don’t arrive in the community where we are waiting without some mishaps. Since it’s super dark they end up driving around in circles for a while before they even find the community where we are. Plus one of the boat motors dies so the other boat has to tow it until they reach the community and have a chance to fix it. Motor problems seemed to be a common theme that day. So when they arrive we are FINALLY all reunited after 12 hours and we all pile into the third boat and set off to go back to Nauta together. The problem is that two of the boats have searchlights but ours doesn’t. So during the five-hour trip downriver back to Nauta, we all stay close together so my boat captain can see well enough to avoid stuff that’s floating in the river that might damage the motor.

We arrive at Nauta around 2:30am and miraculously, our bus is still there waiting. We take the bus back to Iquitos and arrive at the hotel around 5am. We are all ravenous because we haven’t eaten for so long but at this point the biggest priority for everyone is sleep. Both of my roommates want to take showers before they go to sleep because we are all covered in sweat and bug spray and river water, but I am so tired that I crash with the lights still on. In the morning I woke up around 10:30am, showered, and went with my friend Maggie to a tourist restaurant called Yellow Rose of Texas to eat the most delicious banana pancakes of my life. Fin.