Leticia, a ferry through the jungle, and beyond

I awake from an awkward sex dream that always ends with the woman I'm having sex with morphing into somebody I know. Not anybody that I want to have sex with though, usually it's someone I don´t like, or they don't like me. I look out of the window and take a moment to acknowledge that I am flying over hundreds of miles of trees, bunched together tightly like the queue for the opening day Selfridges sale. It's a real life rainforest. bloody hell!

It´s a wonderous site and as we land I know that the next few days are going to be very different to my normal life.

Leticia sits on a triangle of borders that combine Brazil, Peru and Colombia. You can basically walk from Colombia to Brazil and back again. It's a lot of fun.

I am officially on the booze again and sink a few beers with Phillipe, a really nice French dude who was on my flight. Lager has rarely tasted better than when you've been forced off it by a little shit of a parasite. and I learn quickly that here they like their lager ice cold. We sink a few and retire to bed. We'd arrived on the last night of a 3 day bender that they have here to celebrate the independance days of Colombia and Brazil. Everyone around looks hammered and the party was dwindling rapidly.

The next day I prepare a shopping list for my ferry through the amazon:
A hammock
5 litres of water
crisps
biscuits

I panic buy the hammock, settling on a nylon diamond stiched one in multicolours. I don't actually take time to consider the size of it, or the fact that I'll be lying in it for about 13 hours a day. I will eventually find out that not only is it not very comfortable, cuts into my back, making it look like I´m wearing a skin coloured Pringle sweater, that I paid well over the odds for it.

"you got properly stung" is said to me by the 5 other travellers bunked next to me on the boat.

I spend a lot more time choosing the crisps. Crisps are a very difficult choice on a daily basis for me anyway, I will stand in the corner shop paralysed for a good while weighing up the various brand options first, not even getting into the minefield of flavours until much later. But now I am face with a Everest sized challange,
"What crisp flavour will I eat for 4 days in a row?"
And the selection is poor, after about 20 minutes I settle on what I think are bbq flavoured walkers style crisps, thinking that they spicy ish flavour will keep me happy for the week.

Turns out they were just bacon flavour, and by day 2 I was giving packets away to the kid with the scary eyes, but saying that, even if I liked them I´d have given them to him, his eyes were see through sky blue, and he freaked me out. And he stared at me all the time, but I did conseed that this could have been because he'd never seen ginger hair before!

Now I get on the boat, set up the hammock, and settled in to watch the rest of the passengers put up their bigger, nicer, more comfortable hammocks.

The boat has the look of a 3 leveled freight ferry, and that will be because it is one. The bottom tier is full of brand new motorbikes, while the top 2 decks are filled with us.

Towards the end of day 1 the sound of bongos starts to reverberate around the deck. There's no pattern or rhythm to it from what I can hear, and upon looking for the source I understand why................

Picture if you will a topless traveller in linen trousers banging these bongos with his eyes closed, nodding his head from side to side. He´s got about 6 nitted bracelets on each arm, and one on his ankle.
"this" I think to myself,
"is not going to get any better"
And of course it doesn't, pretty quickly one of his mates takes over the bongos and out comes the mouth organ, a fucking mouth organ! They don't even sound good when a professional plays one, and this clown sounds like he's bought his the day before. They then proceed to 'jam' for the next 20 minutes. And when I say 'jam', I mean 'practice being shit'

I have always hated people who play music in public, without any regard to the people around them, I consider it the ultimate act of selfishness, to force upon everyone else what you want to do.

Music should only be played in public when you are:
Invited to do so by the vast majority of people present
Being paid to do so
Very fucking good at it.

And this chief was none of these things, and if you're not any of these things then you're practicing an instrument that you can't play, in front of people who don't want to hear you, not your proud parents, who sit and watch 'little Timothy' learn the piano.

I may as well have turned over a couple of bins and start smashing them with sticks. Inconsiderate Wanker.

This debarcle went on every day, and put me right off my lying down a lot and reading. But I have always been very positive and upbeat person, who tries selflessly to let every humanbeing express themselves, so I didn't throw him overboard. Or his stupid fucking bongos.

After 4 days of very little aside from sleeping on other peoples hammocks while they played cards, watching dolphins, bird spotting, and staring at the amazon, we pull into Manaus.

Manaus is a tough seaport town surrounded by rainforest. The men are all tough looking and drunk looking. These are hard men, who work very hard, and in turn drink and fight hard too. The women don't look much better, and you can imagine them giving as good as they get.

There's a smell of booze, violence, and sex in the air. And in that order.

I'm pleased that I am flying straight out, but still manage to get drunk with Ben from the boat, and make plans with the French boys to meet up on the coast.

Onward to Joao Passoa, the coast, and me star in a real life soap opera for 2 weeks.