Leticia Colombia is as interesting for being where it is as what it is. It is the southernmost town in Colombia. If you get in a local canoe and make the short hop across the Amazon River you enter Peru. It is also easy to head out for a walk and find yourself in Brazil. The border exists only as an unnoticed notion in this area. It has in the past served as a haven for smugglers of all manner of black market material, some of it still squirming and squalking. It still feels very much like a frontier.
As the Amazon is so much in the international imagination you will find many options to do jungle tours etc. I skipped things like "monkey island" and did a few trips on local transport. The most common forms of local transportation are the wide variety of boats that line the riverbank. There are scheduled boats that leave Leticia and stop at every shack on the river. The locals returning to their homes all carry at least their own weight again in goods picked up in town. You will have to crawl through bags and bags of rice, boxes with flat screen TVs and bales of barbed wire to get to your too small for your Gringo ass seat. You also see people who do not get on the boat handing off parcels with scribbled names to the attendant. These packages will be handed off as you make your way upstream. All in all it is a great day on the river.
Two hours upriver from Leticia I got off in Puerto Narino. I was expecting a typical Colombian dump of a jungle town. Amazingly Puerto Narino looks almost like a Garcia Marquez version of the magical tropical village. They have cement streets and all the houses are painted. In itself the use of paint is unique in that it is paint. Paint is generally something that you buy only after all the real necessities have been taken care of. Paint in rural Colombia is a luxury, a symbol of apparent affluence.
After walking a few blocks I realized that the streets were devoid of motorized transportation. No river of motorcycle, no stench of diesel. Then the rain began. It is a rain forest. I found shelter with some locals in a market building. As it was not market day the building was empty except for one guy with a bag of plastic shoes on offer. I struck up a conversation with a young man who decided to tag along. He took me to a school out of town. This is the part I hate. Missionaries. After a while the kid told me his friends had all left the school after being sexually abused. I was surprised, not by the allegations of abuse but at the fact that the locals had not razed the school.
We continued into deeper jungle and the kid told me he was studying ecology and Indiginous plants. He was a native and his Spanish was heavily accented but good. He took great pride in describing almost every plant and tree we passed. After I had sweated through my clothes I suggested we head back. Back in the almost too ideal town we stopped at a shack by the football pitch. A refrigerator on the porch indicated that this was a store and bar. As we sat on a bench and drank canned sugar water a giant macaw flew out of the thick brush and landed on a stool beside us. This was almost too much. I thought maybe someone was putting on the stupid Gringo. But no. This is Puerto Narino.
