Henry III – Sailing (Chapter three)

Note: Read chapters one and two first.

Watch your luggage!

Sailing with Henry III is an experience. Most time is passed sleeping or relaxing in the hammock. It is always a good idea to keep an eye out for your luggage, which usually is stoved beneath the Hammock. Some people travel with so much luggage and big boxes that they have to make a pile in the middle walkway, making it almost impossible to pass (if it already wasn’t!). I guy I talked to while catching some fresh air on deck after sunset just got his camera stolen in the lancha. He said petty thievery was the only risk on board. After departure, no-one would ever think of stealing a whole bag (would be difficult to get away with!) but there are obviously many children around who are taught to open bags and only pick valuables. After learning that, I hurried down to check my luggage again, paranoid as I am. But I made it the whole journey without losing anything. I tied all bags to the pole and with all zips secured with padlocks, children looking for an easy opportunity would find it difficult to get into my bags.

Trips to the kitchen

Breakfast, lunch and dinner was served on board, all cooked in the little kitchen at the back. When it was ready, a bell rang and all 200+ passengers lined up in a monstrous queue between the hammocks. Before joining the queue, you had to locate your ticket and a serving dish (I obviously didn’t have one but a guy on board very nicely sold me one for an inflated price), in which to collect your food. I was obviously so slow that I each time ended up in the back of the queue. After a couple of days I had learned which times to expect food and to be ready to RUN as soon as the bell rang. The lunch the last day, I was the 15^th person in the queue, which was extremely good by my standards. Any better is practically impossible as there are plenty of people who had their hammocks practically placed in the queue and in front of the kitchen.

Breakfast was always soup with a couple of sandwiches, dinner also a soup but lunch consisted of rice or pasta with some meat, normally chicken, which is the cheapest. If you go on this boat, it is necessary to bring some bisquits or snacks on board, or buy extra food from vendors at places where the boat stops, as the soups seldom were suffient for a big guy like me.

Trips to the bathroom

You would like to make most of your bathroom tasks in one trip to avoid making too many. Like trips to the kitchen, trips to the bathroom (not really a room but rather a row of wash basins) were ritual-like. Squeezing through hammocks, ducking for people sleeping and finally arriving at the back, where there were toilets/showers and wash basins with water from the river. Depending on where the boat was at the moment, the water which came up was either just brown of super-brown-blackish. You would avoid washing the toothbrush in this water if possible but it was fine for flushing the toilet. Once when I arrived there to clean my teeth, I forgot my bottled water so I had to return through the hammocks to get it. I never did that mistake again.

Showers

I was thinking a couple of days about a challenging problem: “If you go and have a shower in the brown water, will you be more or less dirty when you come out?” I didn’t come up with anything useful but after two days in the hot Amazon, I was dying for the shower and had a go at it. Showers were in the same cabin as the toilet. The pipe used for toilet flush was just extended to the roof and a shower head was placed on the end. Clever (!) but unfortunately not very appealing. It was the only shower I had on board.

Four days without a shit

After going on board and inspecting the toilet, I think the body entered some kind of self-defence mode and stopped producing a certain type of waste in order to not have to use the facilities. It seemed to work just fine and I managed four days before I had to take out my toilet-paper.

Spare time

I had so much spare time on board and time for reading that I finished my book the third day (I was reading the criminal novel “Men who hate women”, by Stieg Larsson. Well recommended!) It left me with lots of, somewhat boring time, which I didn’t know what to do with. After a couple of days, swinging the hammock into the pole or into the person next to me, days could get slightly wearisome. I thought it was a bit overkill to display my laptop in this crowd so I left it hidden in my bag and played some games on my cellphone instead in between playing with the (at 95% of the time very annoying children), who all wanted to get close to this peculiar person, who looked a little different to all the others on board.

The nice stuff

But no, all was not a horrible, dirty, crowded and boring experience. This blog entry may seem a bit sarcastic but in fact it was a very nice and interesting experience travelling by lancha in the Amazon.  Everything is very green and for several days the boat just passes trees and unpopulated land. One or two times per day, it makes a stop at some little village with tree huts. The villages seemed to be a little bit more frequent closer to Iquitos but it was a welcomed break when lots of vendors entered the boat, offering their fresh grilled fish, rice dishes, churros, soft drinks or water. Also, the sunsets over the Amazon forest is a must-see and just becomes much better from a boat slowly gliding down the river. At nights, the full moon lit the river and the surrounding forest up to a dark glow; a gorgeous view which I definitely wouldn’t want to trade for an airline ticket.

Amongst the 200+ passengers on board, I was the only western ("lost-looking") tourist so I guess most people arrive to Iquitos by air. But what they miss!