From the logbook:
Tuesday, February 23
Awoke to the sound of rain; the second nicest way to wake up!
This is the rainy season and this is the rainforest, so might as well make the best of it!
After breakfast, we cross the river and stop at Letitia, Columbia, a border town between Peru, Columbia and Brazil.
Letitia is colorful and lively, people everywhere, out in the streets, buying, selling, loitering, going about their business. Crowded, messy, a jumble of stores and stands, little apparent order to my eye, and everything so different, you just want to stare and stare. Sometimes I wish I were invisible so I could stare harder and longer.
We are based at the Hotel Anaconda, the nicest hotel in Leticia. There is a swimming pool here, a covered lobby with white plastic table and chairs, the kind found now around the world. Whoever invented them must’ve made a fortune! We’re not staying here — it’s just a gathering place for us. Our home is on the boat.
A shopping frenzy — I feel like a spendthrift — maybe I am. But what fun to shop in a foreign country, especially one exotic and inexpensive. Tee shirts, a dress, Columbian coffee beans — which were hard to come by — we had to try 5 or 6 different shops. What most stores carried was instant coffee, which is what most people here drink. Espresso machines and bean grinders on the Amazon??
We bought (Bob bought for me) small emerald earrings, amethyst earrings, a bottle of wine and a bottle of Pisco, the local spirit.
Fruit markets on one whole street, a burst of yellows and greens. The indoor market is selling fresh fish and slabs of meat and there is a preponderance of forelegs — bovine forelegs — hanging around. We saw a lady selling all sorts of dried herbs. In another store we found una de gato — cat claws — a vine from the jungle purported to have many medicinal qualities. It’s a bag of ground up powder.We pass it up, but who knows? Who knows what properties we are leaving behind? (Paul Simon’ lyrics comes to mind, 25 years later…. there is a frog in South America has the antidote for pain… That song, “Senorita with a Necklace of Tears,” would be released in 2000.)
Segundo and Victor are working hard for us. They show us the town, they translate for us, they barter for us. Victor introduced us to the jeweler where we bought my earrings.
Segundo is a great storyteller. We warm to his subject, he loves to explain to us, to tell his stories which he spills forth slowly, enjoying his influence, his ability to teach. He is a bright and likeable man, but once he begins a story or a lesson, be prepared to listen for quite some time as he spins his tale like a loving spider shapes a web.
Motorcycles are the primary form of transportation and here in Letitia, Columbia, a helmet law seems to be in effect, the little bucket-type are sold everywhere, worn everywhere. Well, the drivers wear them…
We saw a transvestite, or the recipient of a sex change operation, trying to get her motorcycle fixed. (I’m sorry if I offended anyone. I scrawled this in my logbook in 1999. I wrote what I saw because it interested me.)
As we leave the music increases, lively Latin music blasted out into the street. The cantinas are filling up.
But it is back to the boat for us, where a good lunch awaits, and an afternoon siesta for me and Bob.
Continued…
Copyright Linda Collison; 1999, 2024