Welcome to the Neighborhood

This is where I’m staying -- Hospedaje El Pirata. I’m renting a furnished room on the second floor for 200 Soles a month. That’s roughly $75. The key was to find a place that would charge me like a local and not a tourist. To do that, you gotta network, likeso: The lady who runs the Hospedaje, Maria, is the nextdoor neighbor of the mother of the girlfriend of my friend, Cesar, who is the cousin of the former schoolteacher of Kris, a Peruvian whom I met at Jimmy’s Gringo and Latino Friends conversation group at Border’s Bookstore on Colony and Sharon, in Charlotte, NC.

So now I have my own place, safe and secure, to keep my stuff while I’m out in the jungle. I have my own bathroom with a spacious shower. A cold one twice a day (and they’re all cold ones) and I can live with the sweat. I have a king-sized mattress that feels like there’s some cardboard in it. I take one of those showers, dry off just a little, turn on the fan, lay down butt-ass naked on my one sheet and I’M DONE.

As far as lighting goes, it’s par for the course: there’s that same, single fluorescent bulb in the center of the ceiling, jutting out crookedly, nakedly, like the conspicuous balls of every un-spayed, rabid dog sleeping in the middle of every unpaved backstreet of Iquitos. I miss lamps. Reading without a lamp in such stark lighting strains your eyes and probably makes them age faster. There’s not much sensitivity to ambience or lighting here. At night, houses are only slightly less dim that outside, where weak gold and white shades outline the silhouettes of people dozing in rocking chairs or drinking Pilsen around little plastic tables which they drag out into the street. Lamps must be considered an extravagance, or just undesirable, because nobody has them. And I’ll be damned if it wasn’t difficult to find one.

I started thinking about the lack of lamps as a reflector of a lack of reading culture. “Nobody reads here,” an older ex-patriot friend tells me. “Not even at the doctors office. The doctor doesn’t give a damn about your time, so they wait for hours to see him, but nobody brings a book.” To be fair, Peru’s literacy rate has been rising consistently over the years; 92.9% as of 2007, according to the government. I heard about a study that showed the average Peruvian read more books per year (50) than the average American (30).

But Iquitos is different. The whole region of Loreto is different. It’s like a Central American fiefdom attached to a cold, proud, conservative Andean nation that pays it little attention. It’s literally a backwater. The unemployment rate in the city is 65%. Who knows what it is out in the jungle. The only mandatory schooling goes through sixth grade--and even that’s not free.

While considering all their historical disadvantages, which can never be overestimated, it does heed us to note how the people of tropics have a different culture. Many historians and anthropologists consider the dramatic change of seasons in temporal zones like Europe and Asia as the catalyst for the long-term planning that gave birth to civilization as we know it. Tropical lands, however, are basically the same all year round and extremely abundant, so abundant that their native peoples were subjected to half a millennium of rape, pillage, slavery and murder known as colonialism. Anyone who has studied indigenous groups knows that life for hunter-gatherers involved no more than three hours of work a day. The jungle is full of food. It was our evolutionary womb, and it provides. Even in the slums of Belen, when you see the yucca, the plantain, the corn, the camu-camu, the mango, the sugarcane--all of which grow basically in your backyard, and the hordes of imposing chickens strutting at your feet, you realize that, while these people may be malnourished in certain respects and certainly suffer from parasites and disease, no one is going hungry.

Consider this suppleness of the land, consider the complete vacuum of jobs and finally, the withering heat, and it should come as no surprise that there’s a whole lot of chillin’ that goes on. It’s hard for me to imagine the average Iquiteño passing his evening in a stifling bedroom, pouring energy into an activity that essentially demands solitude. Especially when you recall the scene I described playing out on block after block, night after night. Tropical cultures are more communal. Families sit outside their front door for hours. Neighbors visit and stay deep into the night. And man, can they talk. They probably have as many long conversations in a year as the average web-addicted suburbanite has in a lifetime. And hours of conversation can be just as stimulating as reading a book. It’s a different medium, the original medium: storytelling.

Arrival

The most striking aspect of Iquitos is that almost no one owns a car. Another one of capitalism’s cruel ironies; the Amazon, like most other regions on earth rich in crude petroleum, is a place where few people can afford the cost of gasoline.

No matter--every one rides a motorcycle or a scooter! Old men, mothers with children in toe, beautiful young women with their long black hair blowing in the wind. And just as abundant are mototaxis, with drivers eager to converse with you over their shoulder, as you struggle to hear them over shrill roar of their Japanese or Chinese-made engine. The streets buzz but the air does not have Lima’s mechanic’s-garage fumes.

Alongside every logical explanation for why things are the way they are in Latin America exists another more fanciful explanation that you come across frequently, which sounds like it was spun from the imagination of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s grandma or something. In this case, I had a professional person in Lima tell me that Iquiteños ride bikes and scooters to “stay fresh” in the jungle heat. If it matters at all, that is the reason no one wears a helmet.

For me, these cute little fallacies lose their charm quickly. Men in the Caribbean, for example, even rich ones, swear that women gain weight as they hit mid-life, not due to slower metabolism, child-bearing or depression--but due to all the semen that has accumulated in their system. They swear by that.

Likewise, it has disturbed me how almost all the Peruvians I encountered, even the worldly ones, explained the jungle’s high rates of prostitution, AIDs and bastard children as largely a consequence of the women’s sexual appetite, which is brought to a boiling point by “the heat.”

I have a feeling that, like the “fresh moto riders” reference, this is a kind of euphemistic denial, an attempt at preserving some national self-esteem. “The women aren’t sleeping with every lecherous foreigner because they’re desperately poor and uneducated-- but simply because they’re full of life, full of lust, full of sensuality!”

This place is a tropical paradise. As objective as I try to be, I can’t write off some of the magical beliefs that people hold about it. That the life energy of the jungle, it's ripeness and fecundity, just seep into you, moving you to hunt and sing and reproduce. Maybe people are more sexual in hotter places, because they’re constantly aroused by all the gleaming, sun-browned flesh that’s exposed on every street corner, out of custom, out of necessity. Women straddling motorcycles with their behinds in the air.

Right now, the weather stays at a balmy 80 degrees. I’ve heard some people, including Devon, actually complaining about the heat and the humidity. Compared to summers on the Piedmont, it’s really not that bad. There’s a thin mist of sweat on your forehead and everyone else’s, and like the lack of AC, you forget about it after the first day. In my room at La Pascana there’s a big fan blowing on my bed, which needs no more than two sheets. At night I fall asleep immediately and don’t wake up until I want to.

A Clean, Well-lighted Place

Tony, my host in Lima, was on vacation when I got here, so we spent the first few days running around taking care of errands, seeing parts of the city. This week he had to go back to work at the Canal de Congreso and I needed to start writing. His apartment, with its stark, minimalist decor, just isn't a place where you'd want to spend the day by yourself.

Lima is incredibly loud. The traffic is monstrous. Tony's apartment is nice, by American standards, yet at all hours of day, you hear every single sound created by the lives of his neighbors: the whining dogs, the screaming children, the clamorous chores of the cleaning ladies, the droning radio that nobody is listening to, left on routinely, ceremonially, playing an inexhaustible fiesta with a Catholic sense of passionless duty. Contending with all this, the engines from the street below howl with enough ferocity to permeate our large, street-facing window on the 4th floor. I don't know how I'd be sleeping without earplugs. I don't even know where I'd be able to find earplugs.

If you're looking for a space of certified ambience, good luck. The concept of a "coffee shop" is still a novelty in Peru. For one thing, the people don't drink much coffee. They point out, and correctly so, that it's bad for the stomach. So in a marvelous display of common sense, they simply don't drink it. Instead, they are connoisseurs of "jugo," which translates to juice, I know, but if you order it in a restaurant, you're going to get a smoothie. Everybody's got a blender. The city's full of Juguerías where you can get any kind of smoothie: banana, papaya, strawberry, fruits you've never heard of. Tony served it for breakfast the first week I was there. Coffee remains a desert item, and even then, its only served in espresso form.

The second reason for the lack of coffee shops, and a less surprising one, is the rarity of wireless internet. In its place are "web cafes," hubs of old computers where you can get online for 50 centimos (less that 25 cents) an hour. This is great for checking your email, but the computers are slow and not ideal for doing work. On my 5th or 6th day here, I resigned myself to go to the one Starbucks in Lima, which is in Miraflores of course. On my way, I came across Cafe Verde. It's overpriced and they only serve espresso drinks, but other than that, Cafe Verde gets everything right; the atmosphere, the music (first they played an Andrew Bird album, then Iron & Wine), and the WiFi.