With over
600,000 people Iquitos is the largest city in the world not accessible by road,
Peru’s version of Juneau. It saw
its heyday in the early 1900s with the rubber boom but that ended when some
plants were smuggled to SE Asia where they were cultivated in rows. This made harvesting more efficient
than wandering through the forest looking for rubber trees.
Today the
main industry is tourism. Everyone
wants to sell you something or guide you somewhere. But there are regular people, too. The riverfront and the Plaza des Armes were filled with
music, balloon vendors, food stalls, buskers and families last night. This morning soldiers, sailors, scouts
and every civic group in town replaced them, all in uniform and ready for the Sunday
morning flag raising parade. It
was a nice surprise to hear J P Souza marches, even with a sour note here and
there.
You can take the man out of Texas but you
can’t take Texas out of the man.
This is certainly true of Jerold, the owner of Yellow Rose of Texas, a
gringo eatery where we had breakfast.
He is a retired petroleum engineer who married a Peruvian. He now calls Iquitos home but he brought
a lot of the Lone Star State with him including a collection of sports
memorabilia and his huge ego. He
even has a larger than life poster of himself in his UT baseball uniform in his 'glory days,' half a century ago. The food is
good and so is the music in the upstairs sports bar. It was a nice break after two months on the road.
