I’d heard whispers about the alternate route on several occasions so far, during long busrides or crowded communal breakfasts in the common rooms of hostels.  Eschewing airlines completely, and ditching the more traditional long busrides south into Peru, intrepid travelers with extra time on their hands have a far more unconventional option available.  The Rio Napo runs eastward out of Ecuador into Peru, and then heads south for several hundred miles before reaching the jungle city of Iquitos, known to be the largest city in the world unreachable by road.

The trip is neither easy nor comfortable, and as the boats involved don’t all adhere to a set schedule, the total time for the journey can easily pass two weeks, with eight days as an absolute minimum.  Coca lies 8-10 hours east of Quito, far into Ecuador’s Oriente (generally used as the term for the country’s jungle region, it’s simply an old Spanish term for “eastern area,” and has nothing to do with Asians).  It’s also the largest port city on the Rio Napo, with regular imports and exports downriver towards Peru.  Travelers catch a long, narrow cargo ship here headed to Nuevo Rockafuerte, the last town in Ecuador on the Rio Napo.

From there, a private canoe must be chartered to make the 1-2 hour trip to Pantoja, Peru’s equivalent of N.R., just across the border.  It takes a large cargo ship (known as a lancha) approximately five days to make the trip to Iquitos from Pantoja.  As the return trip takes just as long and it requires at least a day to fully unload and refuel, there are generally eleven days in Pantoja between seeing the ship in harbor.  Some lucky travelers may easily show up the day it arrives, but just as often, people seeking it might be just one day late, leaving them stranded in the dismally boring town of Pantoja for close to two weeks.

Catching the lancha generally leads to a brief sense of elation and relief, though the comfort level drops immediately and continues to plummet for the next four days as the cargo ship steadily picks up more people, pigs, chickens, plantains, goats, monkeys and every other kind of jungle ware.  While the trip takes five days to reach Iquitos, it is possible to jump off early on the fourth day at Masan, where a small patch of land can be crossed by motor-taxi.  From the opposite bank, speedboats make transport passengers by the hour through the final stretch of the Amazon River into Iquitos.

I’ve since described the trip as “like Requiem for a Dream: something really incredible that I never want to experience again.”  For close to two weeks, I got to live not only without Internet, but generally without electricity or fresh water, either.  As only the starting and ending points of the trip contained ATM machines, I came dangerously close to running out of money.  I bribed officials, ate some of worst meals of my life and certainly had the worst nights of sleep ever.

But I can’t say it wasn’t interesting…

The long way down from Coca to Iquitos.