Iquitos to Piura via a 4 day boat ride and the worst recorded 20 hour bus ride

After the conference we went back to Iquitos, forever changed after this experience, my heart full. After a very sad goodbye to our American ministry friends we went to take the launcher back out of Iquitos that Saturday 10th March. We landed up missing the boat (literally), again a problem with never really knowing when it will leave, so we went back to our lovely hostel and waited for the next launcher in 2 days time.

It was nice to have a couple of days to chill in Iquitos again, hanging out with our friend who is on her way to becoming a shaman, we went to visit the nose guy who we'd ministered to on the launcher on the way to Iquitos, plus we watched a shocker of a movie at the cinema. It was so bad... but kept us laughing at the awful sub-budgetness of it. I treated it as a good Spanish lesson as it had Spanish subtitles and the speakers were so bad we could hardly hear the English dialect anyway :)

So Monday 12th March we headed for the launcher again, this time with more success with us arriving there with plenty of time. Leaving Iquitos is upstream so this time the boat took 4 days. Again, I never thought I'd survive 4 days on a boat... Plus sleeping in a hammock!! We had some darling children with us, little Katia (3 years old) stole my heart. She had an incredible ability to arrive every time we were eating, especially apples, which she had no problem helping herself to!!!

From Tarapota began the 24 hour bus ride back to Piura. Which was awful. Again I cannot overstate the extreme horribleness of it. The first 3 hours took 4.5 hours in a pick up truck. It was comfortable (a little squashed but we're used to that!) but took ages as our driver kept stopping to pick up more people or drop them off. That's not the bad part. The good news is we got to the next bus half an hour before it left so perfect timing, the bad news is we got the last 5 awful seats at the back of the bus. The driver drove like a crazy race car driver, so sitting at the back of this budget bus with no shock absorbers we felt EVERY  bump of the 20 hour journey. Each of our seats had their quirks. Mine had no cushioning so I was literally sitting on the bars of the seat. Many a bump I was airborne... only to land with a painful thump, often on top of Natalie who I was sitting next to! When we stopped for our 20min stop we all just sat their looking shell shocked swaying with motion sickness dreading getting back on the bus...