Tomorrow

is our AMAZON JUNGLE TOUR!! 3 days 2 nights in the jungle! I can't believe it, I never thought I'd be doing this since I didn't come prepared with camping gear, etc, but the professional guide company arranges all that. We spent all morning booking the tour, talking to different agents, negotiating prices. There's a guy from Texas here who runs a restaurant called The Yellow Rose of Texas, but he used to be the director of tourism for the city, so he gave us all the best names to go to and told us not to pay more than $35 or $40 per day. So after our Rose of Texas breakfast we got our Amazon tour worked out!! We're going with a young couple from Denmark and a Peruvian guide named Alex who is very cool.

The rest of the day we've spent wandering around Iquitos looking for things like a long-sleeved T-shirt for those jungle hikes--which involved me trying on a lot of men's t-shirts to the amusement of the Peruvians working in the stores; the women's ones are too tight for jungle hiking!--and the artesanía market, which involved a cool bus ride that let us see a lot of the city. We've seen the Amazon River, houses built on stilts, awesome cloud formations, rain and sun at the same time, a rainbow, and almost best of all, it smells like summer rain! AAAH! Plus Iquiteños using mototaxis and motorcycles like Americans use SUVs--constantly and recklessly!

These are all pictures from the city of Iquitos itself.