Leaving Lima

Lima is Huge!!!! I was coming back from a park in the southern end of Lima and I fell asleep on the bus. I was awake for about half the trip but after a total of 2 hours on the bus I still hadn´t left the northern end. It took me a few minutes after I woke up to realize that I was way passed my stop. I got off in a pretty shady area so I got a cab as quickly as I could but I was so far from where I wanted to be that I payed out the ass, killing the whole ideas of saving a few bucks which is why I was on the bus to begin with. So the plan is to go down the Amazon to Manaus in Brazil. It´s like a 7 day float so rather than adding on an additional 3 days on the river I flew into Iquitos, Peru. It has no road links and with 400,000 people is supposedly the largest city like this in the world. Its right on the Amazon and the edge of the jungle. The market in Belen is insane. There are dozens of blocks there filled with stuff out of the jungle, natural medicines, weird fruits, and tons of animal products (including live). It was sad to see these animals in cages but I couldn´t help be interested at the same time. Many of them, like the sloth for instance, I had only seen in magazines or on television. Belen is one of the poorer barrios in Iquitos. Many on the locals there live in floating houses. I was lucky enough to meet some people with a canoe that showed me around. Living on the river as they do is probably the most different type of lifestyle that I have seen. For about half the year when the river is low their houses are on dry land and a lot of them use the newly exposed land to plant rice, then for the other half of the year they put huge balsa trees under their house so that it will float and anchor it the best they can. Out on the river is about the only place you can get a breeze, its so hot here I sweat even if I´m just sitting in town reading a book.