Peru - Lonely Planet Publications [429]
You might also be able to book a berth on a Leticia-bound cruise ship (Click here) if space is available.
Getting Around
Taxis are relatively few and are pricier than in other Peruvian cities, but squadrons of busy mototaxis can oblige with lifts. The ubiquitous mototaxis cost less than taxis and are fun to ride, though they don’t provide much protection in an accident. Always enter mototaxis from the sidewalk side – passing traffic pays scant heed to embarking passengers – and keep your limbs inside at all times. Scrapes and fender bending are common. Most rides around Iquitos cost a standard S1.50.
Buses and trucks for several nearby destinations, including the airport, leave from near Plaza 28 de Julio. Airport buses are marked Nanay-Belén-Aeropuerto: they’ll head south down Arica to the airport.
A paved road now extends 102km through the jungle as far as Nauta on the Río Marañón, near its confluence with the Río Ucayali. Riverboat passengers from Yurimaguas can now alight at Nauta and pick up a local bus to Iquitos, thus making the journey shorter by some six hours. Boats from Pucallpa do not stop at Nauta. Minivans to Nauta take two hours and depart from the corner of Próspero and José Gálvez. There are swimming opportunities at the creeks and beaches en route.
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HERZOG’S AMAZON
Eccentric German director Werner Herzog, often seen as obsessive and bent on filming ‘reality itself,’ shot two movies in Peru’s jungle: Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982). Herzog’s accomplishments in getting these movies made at all – during havoc-fraught filming conditions – are in some ways more remarkable than the finished products.
Klaus Kinski, the lead actor in Aguirre, was a volatile man prone to extreme fits of rage. Herzog’s documentary My Best Fiend depicts details such incidents as Kinski beating a conquistador extra so severely that his helmet, donned for the part, was all that saved him from being killed. (To tell both sides of the story, however, My Best Fiend also reveals that Herzog admitted to once trying to firebomb Kinski in his house. Kinski’s biography, Kinski Uncut (albeit partly ghostwritten by Herzog) paints a picture of the director as a buffoon who had no idea how to make movies.) Near the end of shooting, after altercations with a cameraman on the Río Nanay, Kinski prepared to desert the film crew on a speedboat. Herzog had to threaten to shoot him with a rifle to make him stay.
Filming Fitzcarraldo, the first choice for the lead fell ill and the second, Mick Jagger, abandoned the set to do a Rolling Stones tour. With a year’s filming already wasted, Herzog was obliged to call upon Kinski once more. Kinski soon antagonized the Matsiguenka tribespeople being used as extras: one even offered to murder him for Herzog. While filming near the Peru–Ecuador frontier, a war between the two nations erupted and soldiers destroyed the film set. Then there was the weather: droughts so dire that the rivers dried and stranded the film’s steamship for weeks, followed by flash floods that wrecked the boat entirely. (Some of these are chronicled in Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo, Herzog’s film diaries, translated into English in 2009.)
Herzog could be a hard man to work with, filming many on-set catastrophes and using them as footage in the final cut. The director once said he saw filming in the Amazon as ‘challenging nature itself.’ The fact that he completed two films in the Peruvian jungle against such odds is evidence that in some ways, Herzog did challenge nature – and triumphed.
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JB Moto-Rental (22-2389; Yavari 702) rents motorcycles.
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AROUND IQUITOS
Nearby Villages & Lakes
About 16km from town, past the airport, Santo Tomás is famous for its pottery and mask making, and has a few bars overlooking Mapacocha, a lake formed by an arm of the R