RANSVESTIA

bring a lot of businessmen, tourists and money into the area and they are trying to get ready for it-but they certainly have some distance to go. Part of the city lives on boats that are tied to each other and go up and down as the river rises and falls. Community garbage is dumped in great piles which are crowded with turkey, buzzards, rats, pigs and chickens rooting around in it. Sanitary facilities consist of a number of little floating houses in a back inlet of the river. It is a pretty depressing place but the poverty of South America means that there is a similar “favella” in most cities.

Iquitos is 2500 miles up the Amazon and it is hard to believe but ocean going vessels from Europe come clear up the river to that port. That Amazon is a considerable lot of water. We went out from the city to the place where you get the little outboard boats to the Safari Camp that I was to stay at overnight. That was probably the most excrable road I've ever been on and I've seen some dillies. It was originally cement but they had chopped big holes in the cement for some sort of street work and then sort of gone off and left the hole about ten feet square. They had been that way for about a year as the town didn't have the money to finish the job. After the end of the pavement there were chuckholes more than axle deep and driving wasn't only slow but very circuitous as the drivers twisted and turned from one side to another to avoid the worst ones. I commented that one load of gravel would have filled the holes up to a passable con- dition. From this observation I learned that there was no gravel and no rocks anywhere around. The whole upper Amazon basis is apparently just one bug alluvial fan from the Andes-all red dirt and no outcroppings. So all building materials have to come in by boat and that made things pretty expensive.

We put-putted in the little outboard craft into the stream and then off on a tributary for a couple of miles to the Safari camp perched on the side of the stream. It is a rather primitive place but that is part of the charm. The guide took me for a canoe trip up the river to see what a jungle river looked like. Strangely we didn't see a living thing besides the vegetation except for a couple of fish that jumped a spider and a couple of butterflies. No screaming birds, no chattering monkeys-nothing. It was kind of strange but the nearness of mankind had evidently driven them away

After lunch I took a hike with the same guide back into the jungle behind the camp. How he found his way around I don't know-there

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