welcome to the jungle

the house cat..princesa
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Welcome to the jungle….

I’ve been waiting to use that title.

Accompanied by my much loved Cuso-Mom, Carmen, we boarded the plane for Iquitos. Surrounded by be-hatted and fanny-packed tourists the flight took a little over an hour. I watched with much anticipation as we left the grey non-skies of Lima for the clouds, which changed to mountains and then to a sea of green. I felt like my eyes had never seen trees before, it took me a moment to realise what I was looking at as we began our decent. Oh the smile that was plastered on my face. When we disembarked I was not hit by extreme heat, I did not break out into an instant sweat or disappear into a cloud of mosquitoes. I stood on the steps and took the deepest breathe I had taken in over a month. The sweetness of the air was magic…..I felt like a fancy person tasting fine wine; I recognised hints of bark warming in the morning sun with wet leaves drying in the beginning moments of the days heat along with the freshness of water. How sweet it was.

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Iquitos is a fairly big place, equal to St. John’s from what I can tell so far, but with more people. It ranges from sandy roads to main plazas with fountains. The streets are filled with motocycle-like scooters and motokars (rickshaw type contraptions built out of motorscooters). It is an adventure crossing the road; the only grace is that the motokars can’t go that fast…but you do have to be careful. It is almost an art form, the pedestrians and drivers coexisting without rules or regulation that I can see. The city is certainly alive….the only quiet time is between 1:30 and 2:30 pm, and sometimes on Sundays. Every night the plaza de armas is packed with people, children, balloons and movement. Every day is hot and sunny, it pours for half hour interludes and the thunder shakes the bones apart.

mi vista
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I am happy here. My work team is phenomenal. And I have dined in the Casa de Fierro de Gustavo Eiffel…one step closer to Paris.

Tonight we open the office officially as Carmen and I smash a bottle of champaign over the threshold, with a very pretty hammer, and then the work begins……the reason for all this, the project.

Bienvenidos a la selva, it’s been a long road here.