Up the Amazon on the Eduardo II

picture of what i like to eat here- mostly for my family

Love in the time of Malaria

We just spent six days total on a rusted blue lancha - the only mode of transportation to Iquitos, along the Amazon river. It was something out of a Garcia Marquez novel, only magnified, and with cuisine that included crocodile and giant shapely white worms impaled through sticks and left to grill for a total of 30 seconds each side. The result of this leaves the worm tough and crunchy on the outside, and once bitten into, the inside of the worms, much like jelo, or old expired cream of a bad donut, shoot out into the inside of your mouth, and you have to look at the person that gave it to you, and smile, and nod and eventually, when you are able to, say ´´ay que rico!´´
Cuisine and the effects of said cuisine aside, the Eduardo II, main lancha of the Amazon brought to life characters like the two prostitutes, whom I drew a picture of and wrote a poem about and who I like to call ´´las senoritas del Eduardo II´´; the toothless captain Palermo; the gay cooks who liked to be intimate behind the water tank next to our hammocks; the musicians whose music fit the sound of the Amazon-the most monotonous river i´ve ever listened to- and played all night.
I cant forget the roosters, the monkeys and the parrots.
Being on this river; spending the hours that are so long that they interlap into each other and never advance, I realize why so many stories took place here. And if you see it as a story, as a sort of open-to the point of rotting- womb of characters and stories, you´d have to plow through so many ghosts, to wade through them as if they were a flood, but slow. So slow.