Rolo on Tour

Fully recovered from the Trek near Huaraz I took a nightbus to Lima. Very comfortable but I just cannot sleep in a bus :-(.

In Lima in the very center of Miraflores (the „new center“) I stumbled upon a street where every night lots of people are playing chess. Arriving there I got instantly challengend to a game for 5 Soles (about 1,80$).  After 4 months of not playing I was a bit rusty and therefore a little slow but still the evening ended with me being 20 Soles up :-). The next day went less fortunate but luckily the stakes were only 0.50 Soles a game.

For my dear chess friends here a little fragment:

Me being white with 2 seconds versus 14 seconds left playing Rg5+ and being quite happy him actually stalemating me. Justice!

In Lima I decided spontaneously to book a ticket to spend some days in the Amazon rainforest. For that I needed to fly first to the largest city in the world, which cannot be reached by road: Iquitos.

View from the main boulevard in Iquitos

Iquitos has a pretty interesting history especially involving its role as a centre for the rubber industry at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Too bad for the city that synthetic rubber was discovered!
The day I arrived (with 3 hours of delay) I got shown some parts of the centre. In the artesanial shops around there you can buy really different stuff than in the rest of Peru: Piranhas, butterflies, anaconda skin and lots of jungle medicine. Some impressions:

Somebody wants a souvenir?

Time to go to the jungle: To get to the reserve lodge I was staying I went on a 8,5 hours boat ride. The boat was full of locals and also transported lots of packages to the little communities living along the Amazon. Interesting to see that they mainly carried salt,spaghetti and Inka Cola (the national soft drink in Peru which tastes a lot like gummi bears). The journey was quite amazing, especially the last part sitting on the roof of the boat.

The captain sitting on the roof

And here the backside of the boat

As it turned out I was the only guest at the lodge I was staying at that time. So I had all the possible attention. The first morning we walked for about 6 hours to look for animals in the jungle. Well, I imagined it a lot easier than it was. Most of the time you are just attacked by tons of mosquitos and don’t see anything else. Well my guide Moises was certainly very talented to spot the animals, but as he cannot perform miracles, most of them were very small frogs or ants or some type of little birds. He also taught me to drink water from some type of liane, but you gotta be careful as other types are poisonous.
Deciding that the mosquitos are just too annoying all the other trips were done by canoe. There Moises spotted lots of other animals: sloths, tucans, monkeys and lots of birds. In those occasions a really good camera would be nice as with my digital one you would just see a tree and not the animal sitting in it.
Furthermore we got some glances of river dolphins living in the Amazon river.

One day we went Piranha fishing. Having no experience in fishing at all I needed some tries, but I finally got one (see picture). We had them accompanying our dinner, but they were really small and there was barely any meat on them. But still I guess it is better to eat a piranha than the other way around.

A cute little frog

Gotcha!

My guide Moises

Time for a lunch break

Returning to Lima was really strange. You woke up in the jungle and end up going to bed in the heart of a metropolis. Traveling can be very odd sometimes.

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