Pucallpa

I didn’t really know what to say and think about Pucallpa so I had a quick browse on Internet to see what other people thought. I found a blog describing it as some isolated “Hell on Earth”, which made me realise that indeed I have my own view about the city after all. Although it is a fairly large town, there is not much here to do or see and the centre may seem soulless at times but whatsoever, it is definitely not any hell on earth; far from it. On the contrary, Pucallpa is a tranquil place which I actually decided to like. It has a nice getaway spot (Yarinacocha) down at the lake where local fishers are active and where a row of floating restaurants serve up local dishes and where boat owners offer tours to touristic locations on the other side of the lake. Apart from that, and a small zoological park with a billion mosquitoes, one has to find the charm of Pucallpa behind a tired looking central plaza with the surrounding buzzing “small-townish” streets. The secret is probably to skip the handful foreign-owned restaurants and hotels and go local. Pucallpa has an interesting range of local culinary delicacies with plenty of strange forest animals (turtle, monkey, crocodile etc) on the plates.

The only thing I didn’t learn to like is the noisy “motocarros”, which comprises almost 100% of the traffic in the centre. The small three-wheeled motorbike taxis with a covered passenger seat in the back makes it difficult to hear what you are thinking while walking the streets, as they make much more noise than car traffic in a larger city. But I am sure there is a charm to all that too.