The 3-way border in the Amazon

May 1 - 4

After a very enjoyable jungle trip, I had to get up very early to catch a mototaxi down to the dock in Iquitos, to catch the rápido (speedboat) for the 8-hour trip down the Amazon River to the 3-way border between Colombia, Peru and Brazil. The loading up was quite amusing, with some Peruvians loading an incredible amount of luggage onto the top of the boat - including one guy with a massive (probably 3-4m diameter) satellite dish!

The trip itself was pretty boring, going too quickly to really see anything - especially when the rain set in and the captain was struggling to see out the window in front of him. Thankfully the Amazon River has a lot of manoeuvring room! They served up a pretty ordinary lunch and I had to put up with the mother and 3-yr old kid squeezed into the seat next to me for the whole trip.

Eventually, about 3.30pm, several hours late, we arrived at the small village of Santa Rosa, which is still in Peru, on an island in the middle of the river. Leticia (Colombia) and Tabatinga (Brazil) sit across the border on the eastern bank of the river:

Three-way border - Peru to the west, Colombia to the north, Brazil to the east.

Everyone piles off the boat, collects their bags (and satellite dishes), and those who are leaving the country wander across to the little immigration office. It was opened especially for us, as we tip-toed across a wooden board to get in - half the village was under a shallow amount of river water due to the high season.

After adding up that I'd spent 89 of my allowable 90 days in Peru, the very casual immigration officer stamped my passport, and we headed back to the dock for the 5-minute ferry ride across to Leticia. By the time I found somewhere to stay, struggling around with my big pack in the humidity, it was too late to go to their little immigration office - no matter - you get up to 24 hours in limbo!

View back up the Amazon River as we crossed over to Colombia

In the morning I walked up to Leticia airport to get admitted to Colombia, and wandered around the small riverfront, which doubled as a wee market out of the dug-out canoes - bananas and fish being the most popular items to sell...

Locals selling their wares on the riverfront

Bananas anyone?

Santa Rosa was really nothing much more than a border village, but Leticia and Tabatinga are both reasonable sized towns and share a land border, so the Colombian Peso and the Brazilian Real are both accepted in many places in those two towns. The Colombian Peso is a bit stronger though (ignoring the factor of 1000!), so many places will offer to accept reals "1 x 1" ("1 for 1"), and give a "discount" for paying in pesos.

Typical shop sign accepting reals and pesos

That afternoon, I decided to head across to Tabatinga, just to say I'd been to Brazil, and for the novelty of having eaten lunch in Peru, dinner in Colombia and lunch in Brazil in the space of about 24 hours. There are no border controls immediately between the 3 towns, but if you try and leave any of the 3 towns you get your passport checked to ensure you're legally in the right country. So, I was free to wander across to Brazil for a few hours! It was a very non-descript border, with just one small sign announcing the border... In Portuguese!

The small border crossing sign into Brazil

Despite having learnt a fair bit of Spanish, it was virtually useless once you cross over the little imaginary line into Brazil. I could not understand a single word when a guy tried to talk to me in a little bar where I got myself a Brazilian beer later on, despite a lot of the words being somewhat similar (e.g. the bottom statement would probably be Tabatinga le recibe con brazos abiertos in Spanish - Tabatinga receives you with open arms). It was slightly unnerving not being able to speak the local language all of a sudden - Tabatinga is definitely not a typical tourist destination, so there was certainly no English around!

I did manage to find a good spot to see all three countries at once though...

The three countries in the middle of the Amazon

There wasn't a lot else to do in Leticia, since I'd already done a jungle trip out of Iquitos. I caught up on emails and generally tried to avoid the oppressive heat and humidity - a bit of a struggle as it was everywhere, all day long.

However, Leticia was my gateway to the rest of Colombia - a domestic flight out of here into the rest of the country was much cheaper than an international flight into Colombia. (There was no chance of heading over land into Colombia - while Leticia is considered safe, the regions north of here are still very much coca-growing areas and dominated by guerrillas). So, after a couple of days relaxing there, I caught a flight to Cartagena, on Colombia's northern Carribean coast, to continue my adventures...