9 Holes at the Amazon Golf Club

Right outside of Iquitos is the Amazon Golf Club, the only golf course within five hundred miles. It’s 9 holes, carved out of jungle by a Brit called Mike. It’s a 2,500 yard par 35, and Mike claims to have once shot a 32…on the first 2 holes.

You’re issued 10 balls with club rental, but you can buy more in increments of 6. I took 16, and managed to return 2 of them. This is probably the only golf course in the world that includes a machete and rubber boots with club rental, and both are necessary. Here, you lose your ball in the fairway. In the rough, you haven’t got a chance. You’re absolutely forbidden from retrieving balls from water hazards after an unfortunate golfer lost a finger tip to a piranha (this is true, not a joke). But you’re encouraged to fish the water hazards, if you like, and the clubhouse has hammocks.

Mike was on-site doing some groundskeeping, and was good enough to let me help him. He thought it strange that I wanted to help, but after no honest work for a month, I figured it would do me some good. Nothing major, mind you, just cutting down woody weeds and dead palm leaves with the hedge clippers that we call “loppers” back home.

After spending a full day on the river looking for fish the day before, it turns out that the best fishing down here is exactly where it is everywhere else–in a fish pond. Just across the street from the golf club is a restaurant that serves fish straight from their own pond. They don’t let the locals fish it, but they’re happy to let stupid gringos fish it because we catch-and-release. It’s chock full of big peacock bass and lots of other things with Spanish names that I don’t recall. But all very aggressive–it was a challenge just to get the slack from a cast taken up before the strike, and these guys demolished lures. The hook was actually torn off one lure (the split ring survived), and the eyelet was torn out of a Rapala crankbait (the knot in the line survived). Mike says that peacock bass are pound-for-pound the fightingest freshwater fish on the planet, and I believe it–they’re like really, really spirited smallmouth, particularly on the ultralight rig that I’m carrying.

Alas, no pictures of this either, because of the lost camera, but the replacement is already en route. But the golf course does have a website, if you’re interested:

http://www.amazongolfcourse.com/

 

Piranha Fishing with Julio

Low-water season in Iquitos runs from June to November and features some of the best freshwater fishing in the world. High-water runs from December to May and doesn’t feature some of the best freshwater fishing in the world. Nevertheless, I didn’t come here to not fish, so had the good people at Dawn on the Amazon set me up with a guide, and off we went.

The weather was perfect for fishing, overcast with an occasional rainshower. The seasonal flood increases the surface area of the water by orders of magnitude, but the fish population remains the same, so it’s hard to find any fish during high-water, much less gamefish. So we focused on the fish that are always feeding: piranha.

It took us a while to get going as the morning produced only 3 freshwater sardines. Late in the day, we found our spot and our rhythm. It took some getting used to. Whereas most game fish, say bass for example, swallow their prey, piranha nibble them to death. There’s no risk of setting the hook too hard, and you have to act lightning fast–if you don’t set the hook mid-chomp, they’ll never swallow it.

We ended up with four, not a bad day considering all the advice had been that we’d catch nothing. Our four comprised three types: red-belly piranha (supposed to be the best for eating), black piranha (which grow the biggest), and spotted piranha (which have spots).  They call it fishing, not catching, for a reason–if your fun is dependent upon catching fish, you’re doing it wrong.

Dawn on the Amazon was good enough to pan fry the piranha for me. With a side of brown rice, some camu-camu juice (sort of like a sour muscadine), and a coke float for dessert, they made an excellent meal. The fish were incredibly fresh (obviously), and piranha is bony but delicious, very meaty and not fishy at all. Including the cilantro hot sauce makes this a top 5 meal.

Sadly, there are no photos here as my camera has been misplaced.

Super Extra Rice

The Slow Boat to Iquitos

From Leticia, Colombia it is 250 miles to Iquitos, Peru. Iquitos is considered the largest city in the world (400,000+ inhabitants) not accessible by road. You’ve 3 options from Leticia–flying, the fast boat, or the slow boat. Flying takes about an hour, and costs $100+. The fast boat takes 10-13 hours, and costs $75. The slow boat takes 3 full days, and costs $25-$40, including meals. Seeing as I have all the time in the world but no job, the latter option is the clear favorite.

A slow boat leaves each day between 6pm and 8pm, and stops at about a half dozen locations along the way, plus minor stops as people need to get on or off. The boats look like shit but do their job serviceably. You live side-by-side in hammocks on the top 2 of 3 decks, the lower deck being for livestock and cargo. Somehow the second deck is more crowded than the third, for reasons unknown to me. I headed straight for the top deck, if for no other reason than to give myself the best chance of escaping the sinking. It gets crowded as passengers are picked up, so much so that you may have to go double-decker with the hammocks. The boat cruises within 20 yards of the shore, so there’s plenty of jungle viewing along the way.

An example of a boat more crowded than our own.

I’d heard horror stories about the food, and though simple (white rice, beans, a little meat) is was fine by me. Before going, you meet people with all manner of horror stories–the guy whose bag was stolen in broad daylight, the other guy who had his shoes (his shoes!) stolen from beneath his hammock as he slept, etc, etc. To hear them talk, you expect a boat full of brigands, cutthroats, pirates, thieves, and dacoits. The  crowd has it’s rougher elements, and the smell of unwashed humanity after a couple of days becomes unpleasant, but the crowd is not the problem. (They also are not solely to blame for the odor, as I’m sure I was contributing more than my fair share). Because they provide the food, you don’t need much in the way of supplies.

No, the issue is not the crowd. Nor is it the bathrooms, savage though they may be. (I’ll spare you the description, but by the end you just pee of the back of the boat, and if I were a woman I would now be the owner of one of those things that lets you pee like a man). The issue is the oppressive jungle heat. Everyone quickly falls into the same routine to make the heat survivable. Up at 430am, lunch at noon, asleep (aka passing out from heat) at 1230pm, up at 430pm, dinner at 5pm, bed at 9pm, and repeat. On day 3, the heat was murderous. One positive side effect of this schedule is that you’re up for both sunrise and sunset.

The river is so big that it’s almost impossible to take a representative picture. The trees on the opposite bank are 80+ feet tall. For a sense of scale, note the lone boat in the picture immediately below.

By day 4, it would have been suicidal. (It’s so hot here that my laptop is overheating as I write). And so it was with great sadness that we learned from a fellow traveler that the boat would not arrive at 4pm (after 3 full days and nights) as scheduled, but at 2am the following morning. And you haven’t known joy until you learn that the fellow traveler was wrong and that the boat was actually arriving at 2am this morning, a full 14 hours ahead of schedule.

Mosquito Tour Part 2: The Amazon

Leticia is Colombia’s Amazon outpost, inaccessible by road. Here, Peru, Brazil, and Colombia all meet on the Amazon River, making this South America’s other Triborder Region (although this area is not yet host to elements of Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard–the worst here are your run-of-the-mill narcotraffickers). Because the towns are so inaccessible, everyone moves freely between the three countries, with border control only at the airports and on the river.

The Amazon almost defies explanation. It might be the most otherworldly place on the planet, and while it’s jungle, it’s nothing like what one thinks of as the jungle. There is almost no mammalian life here, at least not on land, other than humans. Small monkeys survive without ever touching dry land, and there’s an occasional jaguar, though they each roam over several hundred square miles, making sighting one almost impossible. Insects, birds, and fish are in heaven here. Pink dolphins live in the water along with peacock bass, anaconda, caimans and crocodiles, hundreds of kinds of catfish, and the pirarucu, the largest freshwater fish in the world. The water in the entire basin is either stained or muddy, so, truth be told, man doesn’t quite know what’s down there. There are more species of life in a random square kilometer of the Amazon than in the entire North American continent–a rather pointless “fact”, as everyone knows that taxonomy is arbitrary, but you get the point.

The Amazon River is the biggest river in the world–bigger than the next 7 combined. The river floods annually, in some places rising by as much as 60 feet. Between the rise and fall,  that’s about 4 inches of depth per day–so if you stay even 2 days in one place, the difference is obvious. During the flood, millions of square miles of jungle are inundated. The rivers spill their banks and flood the forests, leaving only a scattering of islands inhabitable. There are thousands of rivers and lakes that are subsumed into the Amazon, only to be revealed again when the water drops. There are rivers here the size of the Mississippi that don’t even have names because they appear for so short a time. Oceangoing ships can sail 2,200 miles upriver,  without any dredging. An early Spanish explorer famously sailed 300 miles up the mouth of the Amazon before realizing he was in a river.  For a waterworld, the Amazon is remarkably like a desert. The water is undrinkable, there is almost no land, and there’s no soil to speak of–the only source of nutrients is decaying plant matter. The insects here will literally eat you alive.

We spent a couple of days and one night deep in the jungle, providing more than ample sustenance to the region’s thriving mosquito population.

The highlight, for me, was our indigenous friends, and their pet sloth.

Here are a macaw, eating a straw…

…and one eating rebar.

Back to Bogota

After a 25 hour bus ride from Cartagena, I met up with the darling Yuly (La Gringa) who showed me around the city. We saw some modern art and walked around La Candeleria, and walked the streets in the foothills near Montserrat, which hold commanding views of the city.

After that, we had a quick coffee (in an old rail car, strangely), before heading to Yuly’s sister’s place. Then American style hamburgers with Yuly’s sister Vivi and her American husband Zach
(amazingly hospitable, both), a movie from Zach’s extensive collection (archive may be a more appropriate descriptor), a good night’s sleep, excellent breakfast with fresh juice, and on to Leticia in the Colombian Amazon.

 

Don Ramon

If you don’t know Don Ramon, you don’t know Mexican soap opera.

What Do You Do For a Living?

Me? I’m in lamination.

In Colombia, Even the Mannequins Are Sexy

Silly O’Clock

At La Brisa Loca, aptly named.

More Pictures from Las Gringas

Out-of-Doors Political Activity in Cartagena

On Saturday morning, I kept running into a political protest in Cartagena. They’re called Mira, and their signs and chants suggested that they were for freedom of expression, anti-discrimination, and anti-corruption–plus, the crowd was full of beautiful girls, so I joined up.

We hit all the main plazas and a number of government buildings, primarily chanting “La iglesia no discrimina” and, naturally, “Si se puede”.

As the day went on, it became increasingly clear that this wasn’t just a political movement.  It seems to be a religion/political movement combined, with the religious part most comparable to the Pentecostals. And it turned out that the real reason for the protest was that they don’t allow the handicapped to minister, and have been accused of discrimination. They claim hypocrisy, saying that it’s no different than the Catholic church not ordaining female priests. They’re right, of course, but being equally wrong doesn’t make much of a rallying cry, at least to me. That, and the fact that one supporter called them a cult (in English) prompted my departure.

There was a little pushing and shoving toward the end, but the police were close at hand,

Ceviche at La Perla in Cartagena

I finally got it right. La Perla is not a ceviche restaurant, but they have it, and I’d heard it’s good. It’s more reasonably priced than the better-known cevicherias, at about $10/per.

I first had the Ceviche de Peru, a simple dish, but done the way that ceviche should be done. Sea bass, lime juice, cilantro and dill, and thin sliced red onion are the basis. The sea bass was less “cooked” than customary, but for the better. The innovation here is the inclusion of roasted corn, which adds a bit of umami. It was crisp, light, well-balanced, and delicious.

My next dish was the Ceviche con Amarillo. This is basically the same as above, with a couple of changes. Shrimp replaces sea bass. I normally avoid shrimp because it becomes unfresh more quickly than white fish, but in this case it was perfectly fresh, and so was an improvement. It also included amarillo pepper sauce in with the lime juice, which added mild spiciness, like good ceviche should have.  The difference here is that by using sauce instead of raw diced chiles, the spice was perfectly uniform. That, combined with the corn, makes this the best ceviche I’ve had. I literally ate the remaining lime/pepper juice with a spoon. Lima will have a tough act to follow.

My shining moment–I managed to order a proper champagne cocktail in Spanish.

Street Ceviche in Cartagena

 After my failed attempt at fine dining at El Boliche, I went in search of street ceviche for lunch. I found it at the entrance to Getsemani, just outside the main gate to Cartagena’s old city (El Centro).

It’s more of a shrimp cocktail than ceviche, but a damn good shrimp cocktail. You pick the size of the Styrofoam cup, and they add shrimp, or, in my case, shrimp and fish. On top goes finely diced red onions, lime juice, a couple of dashes of various liqueurs, ketchup, and a bit of mayonnaise. It’s all mixed together, and served.

It wasn’t particularly cheap–almost $7 for a medium–but it was really tasty.

It also proves the old adage that street food is always better. If you want evidence of this, go buy yourself a $10 hot dog from Spike Mendelssohn on Capitol Hill, and $8 half smoke from Ben’s Chili Bowl on U St, and the daily lunch special (2 hot dogs, chips, and soda for $4.50) from Ahmed on the corner of the 12th and G, chili, mustard, and onions only. It’s not just that the street dogs are better value, they’re better tasting.

Cartagena

Cartagena is easily the most picturesque, but also the most touristy (mostly South American) and most expensive. I’m only spending a couple of days here before heading to the Colombian Amazon via Bogota, drawn mainly by the ceviche. Getting to Bogota means 24 hours (scheduled) by bus, leaving tomorrow afternoon.

Ceviche at El Boliche in Cartagena

According to the local buzz, El Boliche has unseated La Cevicheria (made famous by Anthony Bourdain) as the go-to spot for ceviche in Cartagena. It also happens to be next to my hostel.

I had the Ceviche con Tamarind, their specialty. It wasn’t cheap, almost $20, and they only serve whole bottles of wine and microbrews. Their dearth of a drink selection notwithstanding, the ceviche isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

It includes shrimp, calamari, and octopus, along with some lime, herbs, the customary plantain chip, and an overwhelming amount of tamarind sauce. They also added a great deal of sugar, I’m guessing to temper the tamarind, but it ruined the dish.

Mompos to Santa Marta

This should have been posted before the lost city, but it got held up somewhere in the tubes of the interweb.

A week ago, after trying for three days, I woke up in time for the bus out, and finally left Mompos for Santa Marta, the jumping off point for Ciudad Perdida.

It should have taken 6 hours but took 9, the standard 50% margin-of-error. Only the last 2 hours or so were on tarmac, so it wasn’t the smoothest ride, but it served it’s purpose.

We got to enjoy leaving Mompos on a barge attached to a metal canoe with a Johnson 40 HP outboard that they euphemistically refer to as “the ferry”. By my math, this beast is about 50 ft by 20 ft, and loaded draws about 2 feet of water, or 2,000 cubic feet of displacement. At 7.5 gallons per cubic foot, that’s 15,000 gallons, and at 8 pounds per gallon, that’s a 60 ton boat moving across a 5 or 6 knot current. We grew up with a 35 HP outboard on a 14 ft flatbottom and always thought we needed more power.

There’s also a motorcycle ferry.

Here’s the return ferry.

Pity the girl who had to ride the entire way in the plastic lawn chair.

Ciudad Perdida: The Lost City

A 2-hour drive from Santa Marta takes you to Ciudad Perdida, “The Lost City”. It’s an abandoned city that once housed 2,000 Tayrona Indians deep in the jungle. Discovered in the 70’s, it opened for tourism in the 80’s, but was in guerilla-controlled territory until the last decade or so. Some compare it to Macchu Picchu, which is overly generous, but it’s still pretty incredible.

You can do the hike through a few companies, but the local Indians run the lodges, so no matter who you choose, you do the same hike. It can be done in 3, 4, or 5 days–the 3 day option is pretty uncommon. And it’s tiring at any pace. Anyone in there 20’s will complete it, but from there up you’ll need to be increasingly fit. And it’ll be a workout no matter what. The price is the same regardless of length, so if you’ve more time than money, as I do, you choose the long option.

Along the way are a number of waterfalls and swimming holes, at least one per camp and one in between camps. Food and supplies are brought in on mules, and you eat and sleep each night at lodges, sometimes in a hammock, sometimes in a bed, always under a mosquito net. It gets cold at night in the jungle, so you learn to ask for extra blankets. The food is sort of good but primarily hearty–lots of rice, pancakes, beans, spaghetti, etc. You take your own pack, but can hire a mule to take you out if you get in trouble (or to take your luggage), at $40/mule/day. The final camp, that closest to the lost city, is inaccessible even to the mules, so from there on porters do the hauling. These guys are up and down the mountain all day carrying 100 pounds or more. The way they do it, it turns out, is coca leaves. When the men turn 18, they get a hollowed-out gourd that symbolizes manhood–it allows one to live with a woman. They fill it with crushed snail shells, take a chaw of coca leaves, then take a glob of snail shells. They taste terrible, but a chemical reaction occurs in your mouth, releasing the active ingredient in the coca. They were good enough to share it with us, and it makes your mouth numb and raw, but gives you more energy than you could ever need. These guys are on this shit all day long.

Our group included a couple from Medellin, a family of 4 from Medellin, a couple from Leipzig, Germany, me, a cook, a guide, and the guide’s son/assistant. The German couple includes an American man and a German woman, who had an awesome love story. They had a short relationship in Mexico 23 years ago, before they broke up because he didn’t want to settle down. She tracked down his sister a few years back, who hadn’t heard from in for years. They learned later that he lived outside of Phoenix, and got an address. She came to the US to snow ski, had an extra few days, and decided to drive from California to see a friend in Russellville, Arkansas. On the way, she realized she’d pass nearby his home, so she stopped in. 3 days later she was still there, and never made Russellville. When her trip ended, they talked about seeing each other again. They agreed to get together on her vacation 6 months later, and she flew back to Germany. He called 24 hours later, said that he’d wasted the last 23 years of his life without her and wasn’t going to waste anymore, and that he’d be in Leipzig the following week. They’ve now been happily married for 2 years, and are currently traveling Colombia together,

Back to Ciudad Perdida; you start at 400 feet and climb to 4,000, but there are a couple of mountains in the way. You climb to about 2,000, before dropping back 500, then up another 1,500 that you immediately give back. From there it’s 2,500 feet to the top at about 4,000 feet. So you’re only gaining 3,600 feet from start to finish, but you pay double for most of it and triple for some or it. The last phase is up 1,200 stone steps that wear just about everybody out.

Colombia is calm and safe now, but this isn’t exactly a pro-government stronghold, so the military keeps a presence here. These guys camp in the Lost City itself, placing it among the most picturesque military camps in the world.

We polished off a celebratory bottle of scotch that I packed in. If I’m not the first person to carry a fifth of scotch in, I’m definitely the first to carry this cheap of scotch in.

Here’s our guide’s son having a nap midstream

 

 

Las Gringas

In Mompos, I met back up with our Colombian friends with gringo names–Yuly (Julie) and Loren (Lauren), affectionately known as Las Gringas.

We took it easy exploring Mompos for couple of days–highlights included sneaking into church to take pictures, having a swim in a closed swimming pool (which I’m certain harbors brain-consuming amoeba), and making a couple of home-cooked meals–pasta with homemade tomato sauce and mushrooms one night, and pork with potatoes and a yucca-like starch one afternoon. I twice tried to take them to El Fuerte for the best pizza on the planet, but it was closed because the chef burned his finger–at least that’s what we were told.

The girls are lovely and charming, but also happen to be pretty incredible amateur photographers. Some highlights of theirs are below.

Pizza (!) at El Fuerte in Mompos

Just about a block upriver from my guesthouse is a place called El Fuerte that specializes in pizza and steak, plus some Austrian specialties. I’m not normally much for Europeanized food when such great local food is at hand, but it was a long day, I was tired, and it was handy.

El Fuerte is located in the former jail where Bolivar raised his army, putting Mompos on the map. It’s been renovated inside but in a way that feels authentic. The furniture, artwork, furnishings, etc, are all handmade locally and are all for sale. The Austrian chef, Walter, is in the kitchen everynight. Everything is open here, including the kitchen, so it’s sort of like Blue Duck Tavern at the ends of the Earth.

I walked in and sat at the bar. 15 minutes went by before anyone spoke to me. I was then asked whether I had a reservation. I glanced around and saw seating for 50, with no more than 10 people in the restaurant, 6 of those staff. 15 more minutes elapsed before I was offered a menu. Pizzas started at 30,000 pesos (~$15) and steaks at 50,000 (~$25). The former is a small fortune here, and the latter will buy you a human kidney. (Actually, all kidding aside, $25 is the going rate for contract killings in the barrios of Medellin).

I began writing this blog entry in my mind…

“I didn’t come 25 hours to wait on shitty overpriced pizza, but wait on shitty overpriced pizza I did.”

It continued from there in a similar vein, a real stemwinder. But then something incredible happened. The pizza came, and it was The. Best. Looking. Pizza. In. The. World.

But pizza is pizza, right? Wrong.

Everything in here is perfectly fresh, and I only learned that by backing into it. After tasting The. Best. Tasting. Pizza. In. The. World, I started watching what was going on in the kitchen. A pizza would be ordered, and he would cut up the tomato for it. And chop the oregano. And slice the speck, olives, and mushrooms. Every pizza was literally custom made, without even any chopping done in advance. What this man is able to do at the absolute end of the global logistics network should make the people at Il Vicino suicidal.

Here I was, in the middle of nowhere, in a town that most Colombians haven’t even heard of, days up the Rio Magdalena, eating the freshest, most flavorful, and most perfectly balanced pizza pie on the planet. That’s not to say that the service is prompt, or that you aren’t eaten alive by mosquitos even though you’re indoors, or that it isn’t overpriced. It’s just that all of those things are forgiven. Stumbling onto this place (El Fuerte) in this place (Mompos) is about as likely as stumbling into Martians down here. It’s literally a first class restaurant, a thousand miles from nowhere.

Oh yeah, and it really makes two meals, so isn’t overpriced.

Oh yeah, and they have free grappa at the end of the meal.