Travelwriter, Ecuador to Peru: "A super-highway of bustling life between muddy banks"

[This story is one of ten shortlisted in the 2015 Irish Times Amateur Travel Writer competition]

We had not expected to be asked to get out of the boat mid-stream, hundreds of metres from either bank. This was the Rio Napo, Ecuador and we were in a very long, narrow canoe-taxi making our way from Coca to Iquitos in Peru; a distance of 1140km.

The canoe was carrying tons of food and drink, building materials (including cement) and numerous domestic items, to hamlets deep in the Amazon jungle. Sitting on hard seats on either side were about 80 men, women and children. The weight of all this coupled with the low water of the beginning of the dry season resulted in the boat grounding on sandbanks.

Guarding themselves from the little candiru fish (which will swim up delicate passages of the human anatomy in the mistaken belief that they are swimming into the gills of larger fish, in which they spread their spines preventing backward movement thus causing some considerable grief to the recipient) the passengers were required to wade waist-deep into the water and push the boat off the sandbank. This slow passage changed the first part of our trip to the border town of Nuevo Rocafuerte from a journey of 10/12 hours to one of 15 hours.

The consequence of this was that the latter part of the trip was in total pitch darkness, and was spent searching for isolated and unlit settlements along the riverbank where passengers disembarked. One lasting image is of leaving a family of two little girls with their parents, forlornly calling out for 'papi' standing on the bank of the river surrounded by an intensity of flying insects that defied belief.

Undulating lines of bioluminescent insects weaved their way down the length of the boat and disappeared into the darkness of the jungle. How the river, with banks up to a kilometer apart, was navigated in those last few hours of total blackness was incomprehensible to us. Flitting along the river like spectres in the night were small hand hewn canoes paddled by Indian women and their many small children. When asked why they had so many children we were told 'because children drown easily'.

Arriving in Nuevo Rocafuerte, which is the last village before Peru, we transferred to a small canoe and joined our guide 'no problemo' Fernando. In a pristine lagoon (Panacocha) Fernando prepared bait of raw chicken and agitating the water with the tip of a fishing rod, mimicing the death throes of a distressed animal to attract voracious pirana, we landed our first fish. We were now deep in the jungle but occasionally along the distant banks we could spot a thatched hut, on stilts to cope with the ever-changing river levels. We stopped at one of these, where a Quichuan family of two men, two women and a child lived. These Indians were half our size and we occasioned great hilarity when we bumped our heads on their low roof. We had brought sweets and dried food as presents, and were welcomed to cook on an open fire and sleep on the floor made of Yuca or Manioc, a woody shrub whose root is a source of carbohydrate in the Indian diet.

That night we ate our (bony) piranha with rice, and went to sleep hoping to avoid the assassin or 'kissing' bug which lives in the thatched roofs and drops on you in the night with unfortunate consequences. And finally the Amazon. This was the lifeline of the Amazon jungle; a super-highway of bustling life between distant muddy banks. We had arrived in the jungle city of Iquitos.