Amazon

The Swedish keyboard doesn't work here so a Swedish post will have to wait.

We arrived in Iquitos (north east Peru) yesterday evening while a very cool thunder storm was displaying some neat lightning at the edge of the city. As soon as we stepped off the plane we knew that we were in the tropics with a humid heat hitting us like a blanket. We had some trouble finding a hotel room since many places were booked full but finally found a nice place with AC and clean rooms....a huge step up from the place we stayed at in Lima (a really bad place that had not been cleaned for a while -- used condoms on the floor, dirty bathroom and dirty sheets).

Iquitos is a town that can only be reached by air or by river. No roads lead here and it feels like you are dropped in the middle of nowhere, which I guess you are. Surprisingly, there are lots of cars and motorcycles in town. Must be expensive to get a car delivered here.

We had an awesome Chinese dinner last night and the lunch today was even better with fish and rice. We seem to be staying healthy now too which is a bonus :). We even dared to have some ice cream in Lima before our flight. It was sooooo gooood!

Tomorow we head into the jungle on a 4 day Amazon trip. We will stay at a jungle lodge about 140 km upriver from Iquitos and from there we will explore the area. Lots of fun stuff like seeing river dolphins, hunting for spiders and snakes and fishing for Piranhas. We will also get to swim in the Amazon River.....hopefully we will not catch some weird parasite! Ironically, we have TV in our current hotel and this morning we watched a show on Discovery about parasites....the majority of them South and Central American! Bumps on the head that were some fly larvae and lung problems that were eggs of some other type of flying insect.....yikes!