The destination is the king bed

Sept. 5 —

Three alarms and a 5 am driver

My flight to Iquitos was at 8 am today, with a 6 am airport arrival time and 7:10 boarding. I woke up at 3:55 am. I had set three alarms, for 3:55, 4:00 and 4:05, because that is what I need to do when I absolutely cannot miss something, but I woke up with the first one and turned the other two off. I finished packing my bag, made myself some tea, got all of my toiletries together, took out the trash at the Airbnb, did the dishes, and was downstairs and ready to meet my driver, Sergio, at 5 am.

Driving in Peru is crazy

Driving in Peru is crazy. Everyone says it, and it really is. There are cars everywhere, people are honking constantly, everyone seems to be improvising, and my driver was driving in the middle of two lanes whenever it was remotely possible. I don’t understand why. The only thing all the drivers seem to respect consistently are the speed bumps everywhere and potholes in the roads. At one point we came up behind this enormous group of cyclists riding along the ocean, with several cars around them with their hazard lights on, trying to protect them, and I swear my driver seemed like he was going for the cyclists. I was just sitting there thinking, Oh my God.

There was a point on the winding coastal road where CURVA was written right on the pavement over and over, which made me laugh for some reason. Miraflores is up on these huge cliffs, and then the freeway drops down below the cliffs and runs right along the Pacific. I kept looking at it and thinking about how different it is from the California coastline. So much of the coastline here has been completely built up, with all of these high-rises looking out over the ocean, and I started wondering how that happened historically and whether there were ever conversations about protecting the coastline the way so much of the California coast has been protected. There is this huge piece of infrastructure running along the water, and rocky beaches below that seemed relatively underused, at least from what I could see. There were also these strange little things down there—a pool, a gas station, and what looked like some kind of gondola being built. I don’t know. For as much as I loved walking along the top of the cliffs in Miraflores, the part down by the freeway didn’t really draw me.

A different Lima

The drive to the airport was about forty minutes, and as we got farther away from Miraflores, I also started seeing a completely different Lima than the one I had been living in for the past few days. I knew that Miraflores was a nice area, obviously, and that there were a lot of Americans and tourists and a lot of money there, but it was still really eye-opening to see how much housing there is everywhere outside of that part of the city that looks incredibly makeshift or unfinished. There were dirt roads, half-finished buildings, buildings that looked like they were falling apart, places where I couldn’t tell whether there was glass in the windows or electricity inside, and houses that looked as though people had built them with whatever materials were available. When I could see inside, everything looked very sparse. There was construction everywhere, but it didn’t feel like construction within some larger visible plan. It just felt like everything had grown and accumulated on top of everything else. I don’t really know enough about Lima to know what I was looking at, but it made me realize how particularly sheltered and comfortable the little piece of Lima I had been experiencing in Miraflores really was.

Moving slowly through the airport

The airport, by contrast, felt modern and very functional, and I got there with plenty of time. I decided that I was just going to move very slowly. At one point one of the people driving those little airport carts offered me a ride, and I said no because I wanted to walk. I didn’t need to rush. I had plenty of time. I could just move through the airport as slowly as I wanted to.

The board said that we would be given our gate assignment at 6:45 am, so I had 45 minutes to spend in the food & commerce area. That’s a great strategy to get people to buy things. I bought some water and travel size shampoo & conditioner. I have my shampoo & conditioner bars, but I don’t like the way they make my hair feel, and with the humidity, my hair has been a bit frizzy.

In the airport store, the clerk called me señora. I guess that is what I am now instead of señorita. So that has happened.

My stomach wasn’t feeling great. It wasn’t diarrhea, but it was active and uncomfortable, with these little pains or spasms, and I couldn’t tell if it was something I ate yesterday—the grapes, the smoothie, who knows—or just everything my body has been doing over the past few days. I had brought bananas with me and thought I might get something to eat at the airport, but I didn’t really want anything. I had some tea and sipped water and decided not to force myself to eat just because it was breakfast time.

All the baby angels

As I was moving slowly through the airport, I was thinking about why I’m going into the jungle and what I want from this experience. All the work I’ve ever done has only been to become kinder, more compassionate and more aware of all of us. The mitakuye oyasin, all of our relations—how we recognize one another, help one another, and treat one another sacredly. That is what the medicine is for. Not power or prestige or status. None of that matters.

I was remembering something George said, that all of our prayers are for peace. There is our own personal peace, being peaceful inside ourselves and therefore more peaceful in the world, and then there is the peace we pray for other people to have as they move through the very hard challenges of their own lives.

I was also remembering all of the baby angels we created in the ceremonies last year, and I was calling on them to be with all of us today on the flight to Iquitos. Somehow this turned into me thinking about Beyoncé singing “All the Single Ladies,” except in my head I was singing, all the baby angels. It is a surprisingly good tune for that.

The seat situation

The flight itself was only about an hour and a half and wasn’t bad, although the seating situation was a lot for me. There were two young people next to me who I think might have been siblings. When I got to my row, the boy was sitting in my window seat. They had the window and middle seats and I had specifically chosen the window because I really wanted to see the Amazon as we flew into Iquitos, but when I told him he was in my seat, they both just sort of looked at me. I didn’t have the energy to make it into a whole thing, so I said I would just take the aisle.

That ended up being harder than I expected because the girl next to me was extremely physically active and seemed to have absolutely no awareness of bodily boundaries. Her arm and elbow were touching me constantly. She had the entire armrest, she kept nudging me and rubbing against me, and I kept trying to lean away from her, but then people walking down the aisle would bump into me from the other side. I just felt like there was nowhere for my body to go. That is exactly why I like having a window seat, because I can lean toward the wall and create a little protected space around myself.

I didn’t want to be mad at her because there was an innocence to it. The two of them were playing games on their phones, wiggling around, unable to sit still, and at one point one of the brothers was secretly filming his mom getting mad at the other brother, which was pretty funny. I could feel that none of this was malicious or even particularly conscious. She wasn’t trying to invade my space. She just didn’t seem to register that she was touching me over and over again. I could feel the innocence of it, and I could also feel how much my own nervous system was absorbing it, like it absorbs so much else. It was challenging.

There was also a father on the plane with this tiny newborn baby girl, and he kept standing up, pacing, and kind of dancing with her in his arms. He looked so in love with her and so happy. I kept watching them.

Tears on the tarmac

Because I had given up my window seat, I didn’t get to watch the Amazon appear beneath us the way I had imagined. But when we landed in Iquitos, they opened the back of the plane and we walked down the stairs directly onto the tarmac. I stepped out of the plane and immediately felt the heat. The airport is surrounded by trees and all of this green, and suddenly I was standing there surrounded by the Amazon.

I started crying. The emotion welled up from within and I couldn’t catch my breath.

It felt like seeing Machu Picchu for the first time when I burst into tears. I wasn’t consciously thinking anything particularly profound. I was just walking down the stairs and feeling the heat and seeing the jungle around the airport, and something in me knew where I was before my brain had caught up. I walked toward baggage claim with tears streaming down my face. I felt happy about it all and embarrassed by my reaction. People were noticing me and looking concerned.

Segundo, and the soles I still don’t have

As soon as I got inside there were signs for Blue Morpho, and somehow three different people seemed to be helping me at once. Someone helped me find my bag, someone else carried it, and eventually they walked me out to where my driver, Segundo, was waiting in the car. Everyone was very kind. The problem was that I still had no soles. Somehow I have now been in Peru for several days without ever getting Peruvian cash. I only had American money with me, and the smallest bill I had was $20, so I couldn’t tip the person who helped with my bag. Segundo said he could give him money later.

I sat in the front seat with Segundo, and almost immediately he started asking me what my plans were, how long I was in Iquitos, and what I wanted to do. I told him I had two days here before I went to the retreat center, and suddenly there were so many possibilities coming at me. Animals. Boats. Pink dolphins. Different parks. The place where the dark Nanay River meets the brown Amazon. The floating restaurant. All of these things he could take me to see.

The confluence of the rivers does sound really cool. A lot of it sounded cool. The problem was that I had just gotten off the plane, I hadn’t eaten, my stomach felt weird, I was already overstimulated, and I really just wanted to get to my hotel. But I didn’t know how to tell him that because I didn’t know what my other plan was. At one point he said something like, “You didn’t come here just to sit in your hotel room.”

And inside I was thinking, Well, maybe I did. If that’s what I need to do to take care of myself, I will.

He charges $28 an hour, which I later looked up and realized is definitely expensive for Iquitos, although he is bilingual and it is also valuable to me right now to have somebody who can communicate with me easily. When he asked if I needed soles, I said yes, so he pulled over on this insanely busy street and dropped me near an Interbank.

Walking out onto the street in Iquitos for the first time was a lot. There were mototaxis and motorcycles everywhere, so much noise and motion and so many people, and I couldn’t immediately figure out where the bank was. Eventually I found what was basically a room full of ATM machines. I put my card into three different machines. I kept answering questions and getting something wrong, accidentally canceling the transaction, starting over, trying another ATM, getting all the way to the place where I entered how much money I wanted and then being asked something about denominations that I couldn’t understand how to enter.

I just couldn’t do it.

Eventually I gave up and walked back to the car without any money. By the time I got there I was shaking. I told Segundo I couldn’t figure it out, and we continued to the hotel.

The hotel situation

Then I had the hotel situation to deal with.

I had booked the DoubleTree in June and had a confirmation showing that my two nights were supposed to cost $333. When I checked the reservation recently, the price had somehow become $502 without anyone telling me. I had spent about forty-five minutes on the phone with Hilton last night trying to get it resolved, and somebody had put a note on my account. When I checked in, the woman at the desk told me they were still waiting to see whether they could honor the original rate.

The whole thing was irritating because I felt like I was being treated as though I were creating a problem when all I wanted was to pay the price they had given me when I booked the room. I had the confirmation. I wasn’t asking them for a discount or some special favor. I just wanted them to honor their own reservation. Eventually they did give me the $333 rate, which I was grateful for, but by then I was so depleted from having to talk to so many people about it that even having it resolved didn’t really make the whole experience feel good. Then Hilton sent me one of those “How did we do?” surveys, and I was like, I don’t know. The whole thing was pretty lame.

Originally they said my room wouldn’t be ready until 2 pm, and it was only around 11, so I sat in the lobby thinking I had another three hours to get through. Thankfully they got the room ready early, around 11:30. I went upstairs, took off all my clothes, got into the enormous king bed and just lay there.

I might have slept a little bit. Mostly I just lay there breathing deeply for a very long time.

Eventually I took a shower and tried to go back downstairs to get cash from an ATM nearby, only to discover that it had closed at 1 pm and wouldn’t open again until Monday at 9 am, by which point I’ll already be gone. I cannot believe how hard it has somehow become for me to get cash. I remember it being incredibly easy in Cusco. I’m sure it would have been easy in Lima if I had bothered to do it there, but I didn’t.

I walked maybe a block outside the hotel looking for another option, and immediately there were people trying to get my attention, following me, asking me if I wanted a tour, asking if I needed a ride, wanting to take me somewhere. It reminded me so much of being in Fiji, when people would flock around me and carve my name into sticks and then try to get me to buy them. It was just so intense.

I don’t think the people approaching me were dangerous. Mostly they seemed like people trying very hard to make money by giving tourists rides or selling tours, and several times when I clearly said no thank you, they left me alone. I think I can probably get better at navigating it. But when there are that many people trying to get my attention at once, and I don’t speak Spanish well enough to understand everything they’re saying, I get overwhelmed really quickly. I definitely don’t want to try to navigate Belén Market by myself.

Letting it be okay to rest

I messaged Segundo and arranged for him to pick me up tomorrow morning at 8 am. We’re going to Belén Market so I can buy a hat, a poncho and gumboots. I’m just going to go for it. I am going into the Amazon jungle, so I might as well buy my jungle gear in the jungle. If I don’t want to haul it back to California afterward, I can leave it here.

We’ll be back around 9:30 am, and then I have Mystery School at 10 am. Now I’m on Central time, so it’s at 10 am instead of 8 am. After that I might do something in the afternoon. I might go see the confluence of the rivers. I might not. After looking at the extravagant menu, I don’t think I’m going to the floating restaurant. I really want to just eat simple food. Mostly I’m trying to let it be okay if what I need from these two days in Iquitos is to rest.

I’m about to spend six nights in the jungle. I will be on a boat going there and coming back. I am going to have experiences. I don’t actually need to cram every possible Iquitos experience into the forty-eight hours beforehand just because someone tells me I didn’t come all this way to sit in a hotel room.

I went downstairs for dinner and ordered the blandest thing I could find, which was shrimp with rice. It was really good, but I could only eat maybe a quarter of the rice and a couple pieces of shrimp. I had some tea and sparkling water. Somebody came over because I had barely touched my food and asked if everything was okay, and I told them my stomach was a little sensitive and I was just eating carefully. So now I have an enormous container of rice and shrimp in my room with no utensils. Maybe I can call room service and ask for a fork later if I want to eat some more.

Who designed this?

I still don’t feel great. I don’t have diarrhea, but my stomach is very active and queasy, and I feel tired and run down. It is also not helping that the bathroom in this room is one of the strangest bathrooms I have ever encountered. The toilet is in this little enclosed area behind an enormous heavy glass door that creaks loudly every time I move it. You can’t really comfortably use the toilet with the door open, so you have to close yourself into this little glass-doored room, and there is inexplicably a telephone in there. The toilet paper is in an awkward place. There’s a trash can wedged in there. Everything about it is weird.

The shower is also strange because there is a bathtub inside the same wet area as the shower, so the shower water gets all around the bathtub, and you have to lean across the tub to reach the shampoo and conditioner. At one point I stepped into the tub while I was waiting for the water to warm up and it made this horrible cracking sound under me—not actually cracking, but enough of a sound that I immediately wanted to get out. Water seems to drain onto the floor beneath the tub. I just keep looking at everything in this room thinking, Who designed this?

I also cannot figure out how to turn some of the lights off. I have tried every switch. I know there is probably some completely obvious explanation, but something happens to me when I get this overwhelmed where I stop seeing things properly. My ability to solve even very simple problems just starts disappearing. I can tell that is happening now.

The hotel itself is nice. The bed is enormous and comfortable and the air conditioning is excellent. My room looks right down over the pool, which is all lit up blue tonight and still full of people. There is an elevated hot tub up a set of stairs, and then a waterfall comes down from the hot tub into the pool. The dining room has this strange sunken section where one wall is glass and you can see the pool water pressing against it from the other side. Again: weird design choices.

The destination is the king bed

It is only around 7:30 and I’m already in bed.

I hardly took any pictures today. I think the only picture I took was my dinner. I was just really overwhelmed for most of the day, and maybe I don’t have to make myself process all of it tonight.

I’m thinking about how similar this feels to the night before I went to Machu Picchu, when I had terrible diarrhea and was so worried that I wasn’t going to be okay for the next day. I took Imodium, I woke up, and everything was fine. I ended up absolutely loving my Machu Picchu tour.

So we’ll see what tomorrow brings.

But for my first day in Iquitos, apparently the destination is the king bed.

Abby Kojola Web Designer

I'm Abby. I'm traveling through Peru on my own — Lima, Iquitos, the Amazon — and writing about what actually happens, not the polished version. The overwhelm, the tears on the tarmac, the day the destination was the king bed. If you want to know what it's really like to do this alone, you're in the right place.

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