Peru - Lonely Planet Publications [421]
The best way to visit the reserve is to go by dugout canoe with a guide from Lagunas (see opposite) and spend several days camping and exploring. Alternatively, comfortable ships visit from Iquitos (Click here). The nearest lodge is the Pacaya-Samiria Amazon Lodge (Click here).
If coming from Lagunas, Santa Rosa is the main entry point, where you pay the park entrance fee (per person S60 for one to three days, S120 for four to seven days, additional days S20 each).
The best time to go is during the dry season, when you are more likely to see animals along the riverbanks. Rains ease off in late May; it then takes a month for water levels to drop, making July and August the best months to visit (with excellent fishing). September to November isn’t too bad, and the heaviest rains begin in January The months of February to May are the worst times to go. February to June tend to be the hottest months.
Travelers should bring plenty of insect repellent and plastic bags (to cover luggage), and be prepared to camp out.
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IQUITOS
065 / pop 430,000 / elev 130m
Linked to the outside world by air and by river, Iquitos is the world’s largest city that cannot be reached by road. It’s a prosperous, vibrant jungle metropolis teeming with the usual, inexplicably addictive Amazonian anomalies. Unadulterated jungle encroaches beyond town in full view of the air-conditioned, elegant bars and restaurants that flank the riverside; motorized tricycles whiz manically through the streets yet locals mill around the central plazas eating ice cream like there is all the time in the world. Mud huts mingle with magnificent tiled mansions; tiny dugout canoes ply the water alongside colossal cruise ships. You may well arrive in Iquitos for the greater adventure of a boat trip down the Amazon but whether it’s sampling rainforest cuisine, checking out the buzzing nightlife or exploring one of Peru’s most fascinating markets in the floating shantytown of Belén, this thriving city will entice you to stay awhile.
History
Iquitos was founded in the 1750s as a Jesuit mission, fending off attacks from indigenous tribes that didn’t want to be converted. The tiny settlement survived and by the 1870s boasted 1500 inhabitants. Then came the great rubber boom, and by the 1880s the population had increased 16-fold. For the next 30 years, Iquitos was at once the scene of ostentatious wealth and abject poverty. The rubber barons became fabulously rich, while rubber tappers (mainly local tribespeople and poor mestizos) suffered virtual enslavement and sometimes death from disease or harsh treatment. Signs of the opulence of those days are seen in some of the mansions and tiled walls of Iquitos.
By WWI, the bottom fell out of the rubber boom as suddenly as it had begun. A British entrepreneur smuggled some rubber-tree seeds out of Brazil, and plantations were seeded in the Malay Peninsula. It was much cheaper and easier to collect the rubber from orderly rows of rubber trees in plantations than from wild trees scattered in the Amazon Basin.
Iquitos suffered economic decline during the decades after WWI, supporting itself with a combination of logging, agriculture (Brazil nuts, tobacco, bananas and barbasco – a poisonous vine used by indigenous peoples to hunt fish and now exported for use in insecticides) and the export of wild animals to zoos. Then, in the 1960s, a second boom revitalized the area. This time the resource was oil, and its discovery made Iquitos a prosperous