Iquitos, Peru: Where on earth?

It's nearly impossible today for the average person to remain within the bound of the familiar, the Modern world demanding travel to strange places as an integral part of personal existance, whether one must go across town to pick up or deliver, or whether one is off to a new place for work or vacation. The strange and unfamiliar is Modern norm. Experiencing the new and unknown without a map is a serious problem for the traveller. For many destinations, there are no maps. For those early explorers of the Amazon, maps could mean the difference between life and death. For us today, with our road maps and GPS machines and Lonely Planet Guides, life can be very simple. But, no matter where we think we go and how easily we might get there, we do, in a serious sense, travel without any map at all. We miss entirely what Samuel Fritz had.

Samuel Fritz (1654 – 20 March 1728) was a Czech Jesuit missionary who made the first map of the Amazon in 1707.

Fritz Map

Engraver Juan de Narvaez printed a more elaborate version of the map.

Fritz' job, which he had no training for, was to map the upper Amazon so Catholic religious factions could determine who controlled which areas.

Fritz began (1687) the cartographical delineation of the disputed missionary territory on the Upper Marañon between Peru and Quito. In 1689 he undertook, in a pirogue, an expedition down the Amazon to Pará.

Poorly equipped with instruments, he completed a comparatively accurate chart of the river's course. This was the first approximately correct chart of the Marañon territory. He was also the first to follow the Tunguragua instead of the Gran Pará (Ucayali) and prove it the real source of the Marañon.

Wikpedia, "Samuel Fritz."

Fritz didn't exactly put Iquitos on the map, but he did make the map Iquitos would be put on.

Fritz had something that I have, a moral compass. Mine is sometimes not so accurate and not so reliable. Every traveller has a moral compass, and some even have a map to guide them from where they are to where they hope to go. Some, of course, wish to go to dangerous places. Some go blindly at random and find experience along the way, no working compass, no map, no guide. Paths are often crooked, and one wanders far from the straight and narrow. There is outright perdition. Iquitos, Peru. We are here, and we are together in this place and time, though each alone and on a way to somewhere we know not exactly of. Fritz had that map long before he first stepped into the Amazon. For most of us today that map doesn't exist till we make it ourselves. What follows is, roughly, my map of Iquitos, Peru.

I was thinking of an old movie recently, a movie by a traveller with strange and terrifying mind maps swarming with beasts and monsters. It brought to mind a song I like. One might wonder where we are all going, though we are all in Iquitos in one way or another, many of us on alien jungle paths. I like to hum along as I wander. Quo vadis? No idea. I don't have the benefits of Samuel Fritz' map.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xmunpm_sometimes-i-feel-like-a-motherless-child-odetta_music#.UV6_ofKRAYw

A gentle reminder that my book, An Occasional Walker, is available at the link here:

http://www.amazon.com/Occasional-Walker-D-W/dp/0987761501/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331063095&sr=1-1

And here are some reviews and comments on said book:

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/04/dagness-at-noon.html

Iquitos, Peru: Writing ourselves the city

Over 100 years ago Iquitos, Peru was a world-famous city, one of the major hubs for the collecting and distribution of latex to a newly-modernizing world deeply in need of rubber products ranging from the gutta percha used to coat telegraph and telephone cables to to the seemingly endless need for car tyres once Charles Goodyear solved the sticky problem of vulcanising that eventually transformed human freedom and allowed the automobile industry to "take off"; and then on to the demand for macintoshes or rain coats and rubber boots for the masses in cold, wet climes. Rubber was in, and Iquitos was the place to be, at least till 1912, by which time the surviving rubber trees smuggled to Kew Gardens in central London had matured and had been further taken to Malaysia to be set in orderly rows of tree farms where the industrial harvest of latex was made more efficient, profitable, and workers' conditions were less brutal than they had been in the Amazon for far too long. With the switch to Asia, Iquitos lost its economic raison d'etre and the city, like an exotic jungle flower, wilted and, the bloom gone with the boom, the Iquitos sank back into the mud from which it had come.

To read the rest of this story, please turn to the following link;
http://www.amazon.com/Iquitos-Peru-D-W-Walker/dp/098776151X

A gentle reminder that my book, An Occasional Walker, is available at the link here:

http://www.amazon.com/Occasional-Walker-D-W/dp/0987761501/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331063095&sr=1-1

And here are some reviews and comments on said book:

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/04/dagness-at-noon.html

Iquitos, Peru: Jungle Mind

The mid to late European and American Nineteenth Century had amenities available to the poor that in today's Belen residential area one misses,like a toilet. Outhouses, yes, but still, better than a chunty one empties out the window into the street. Belen is in some ways a mix of the Stone Age and the Late Medieval period of Europe, except that there is some electricity and a lot of cheap consumer goods made anywhere else but Belen where life revolves still around physical wage labour and variations of hunting and gathering. One can easily paint a Romantic picture of Belen, but living there is a different, and usually stinking reality most would go far around to avoid. I like the place and go out of my way to go deep into it where I come out slimed and wreaking. But I can take a shower afterward and get between clean sheets for a reasonably comfortable night's sleep on a full stomach. I'm a tourist. I'd be suicidally upset if all life had to offer me was life living in Belen.  Because I can leave, I like being there.

To read the rest of this story, please turn to the following link;
http://www.amazon.com/Iquitos-Peru-D-W-Walker/dp/098776151X

A gentle reminder that my book, An Occasional Walker, is available at the link here:

http://www.amazon.com/Occasional-Walker-D-W/dp/0987761501/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331063095&sr=1-1

And here are some reviews and comments on said book:

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/04/dagness-at-noon.html