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Iquitos. The frantic, stinking hot, Amazon metropolis. Moto taxis rage the pavement. The faded façades from the rubber boom quiver in the midday sun. From here I plan to board a cargo boat up the Rio Napo to Ecuador. The night before I scout for a “lancha” that does the long haul trip. ”Papillon”, a dilapidated wooden craft painted the colour of the sky. She is more fit for a museum than plying up and down one of the planet’s largest river systems. The captain greets me with a healthy smile of yellow teeth and a strong handshake. He wears a large silver pirate ring on his middle finger that crushes my hand. He is short, “barrellesc”. His stomach pokes from under his greasy shirt, on his bicep he sports a tattoo of a naked woman spreading her legs. He fills me in on departure details for the next morning and assures safe passage as he strings my hammock up on deck. We chat for a while on the muddy bank and watch small bats, furry spitfires, in miniature dogfight with messerschmitt moths, for control of the harbour lights as if it was Churchill’s last great challenge. I ask how long the trip will take - 3 days he says - lighting a loosely rolled cigarette made from jungle tobacco. He coughs and spits into the wet mud. Mosquitos rape my body not protected by clothes. I walk back to my hostel in the humid night, soaked in sweat, and think back on what people have told me about these boats: No food or water, that they run drugs and foreigners get kidnapped. The conditions on board vary from disgraceful to a floating slum, cramped and filthy. I laugh and think to myself “I can take whatever they can dish out”. Day 5. Conditions on board “Papillon“ have deteriorated. Last night a passenger in a drunken rage smashed the toilet bowl. Brown fecal water floods the floor. I refuse to use it and piss off the edge. Hammock space has become something of prestige that you hold tightly. People and cargo fill every space: mothers with daughters, fathers with sons and chickens piled up on me. Every passing day is the same on the river. The crew haul buckets of oil and diesel down to the engine. Breakfast and dinner are little more than greasy rice with a hunk of meat from a mystery animal. I pour the remains to the swarming catfish below. Most nights the boat runs aground on shallow sandbanks and we are marooned until first light. Then all able bodied men are called overboard into the dark water (me included) to dig her free. Day 7. The captain no longer speaks to me about the arrival date and changes the subject. I swing the long tropical days away in my hammock trying to catch a breeze. A small girl plays with her baby chickens and smiles up at me, a woman with heavy indigenous features plucks the sparse facial hair of her lover. Darkness falls fast on the equator. The bare light bulb above my hammock swings like a pendulum hypnotising the palms, silhouetting a jurassic coloured sky. Vultures slouch like hooded witches on their gnarled perches, peering into the boat, casting spells at twilight. I have nightmares of giant kissing bugs, creeping on board and snatching the small children from their hammocks and black rats gnawing holes in Papillon’s hull, until the river claims us all. The captain tells me the river stays the same: a void of green and brown, the flash of pink from a dolphin, the circus of macaws. He recounts a story about a young indian boy who fell from the boat. He couldn't swim and kept going under. The captain dove in but it was too late, the current was too strong and the boy was lost. He believes the spirits of the dead come back as forest creatures: barking otters are mothers who died giving birth, the cries from the howler monkeys at dawn are the ones the river stole. Still not in Ecuador... A storm is coming, the clouds bruise the sky like the eyes of a broken nose.