Helen stirred. “I’ve been thinking,” she said, “That this room smells a bit like the inside of a guinea pig hutch.”

I sniffed, and kind of agreed. We’ve moved to a different house, and I have to admit that I’ve been more than a bit slovenly in my cleaning habits. Oh well, I thought. Better set some time aside to do some tidying soon.

The day drifted on. I relocated to the garden, where I dedicated myself to reading and writing, whereas Helen started to add a bit of decoration to our room, in the form of a plant, and some painted wooden butterflies.

A while later, she emerged. “I think I’ve found the source of the smell,” she said. “There was some poo smeared on the floor.”

Oh dear. Until this point I had always thought it was kinda wonderful to be living in a house where a giant tortoise, who goes by the name of Martin, roamed around the garden, but I began to get an inkling that this might have its dark (and smelly) side. This was reinforced by Helen’s next point.

“It looks like there’s poo on your bag as well.”

And there it was. A drying, greenish lump of tortoise turd clinging around the zip of the front pocket. Euurrgh.

We set about cleaning the poo patches. This might not need stressing, but tortoise poo really smells very bad, and is quite hard to shift from material. Eventually, we emerged triumphant and queasy, and returned to our respective days. A short while later, a disconcerting thought flitted across my mind.

“You know how the room smelled this morning?” I said. “What if we shut the tortoise in with us overnight.”

“That would be terrible,” said Helen.

Around this point, someone rang the doorbell and invited us out for lunch, giving us the perfect opportunity to ignore this distressing possibility, eat some nice food and watch some football (the restaurant was showing the Barcelona – Madrid game, which was somewhat more of a boon for me than it was for Helen). We returned a couple of hours later, full to the brim and keen to enjoy a siesta in one of the hammocks that hang oh so invitingly in the garden.

As a result it was quite a while later when I returned to our room. Of course, it was covered in poo (and a little bit of wee). I began to pull the shoes, and more gingerly, Helen’s dung-smeared rucksack, from beneath our bed, to reveal Martin relaxing at just about the most inaccessible corner of the room.

“The tortoise is under our bed,” I told a housemate. “How do I get him out?” I had previously seen her carrying him out of the house, presumably to ward off a similar poo incident.

“You could use a broom,” she said. “Just don’t damage him.”

I got the broom and looked under the bed again. Martin was facing the far wall, meaning I would have to get him to turn around. I waved the broom in front of his face. With crushing obviousness, he retreated into his shell. I sensed the broom idea wasn’t going to work.

Happily at that point help arrived, in the form of a neighbour named Rosita, who had been asked to come around by our landlady in order to help put up Christmas decorations. Together we moved the bed and exposed the tortoise. Helen swooped in, picked him up and heaved him out to the garden (large tortoises are apparently pretty heavy). Rosita also took control of the cleaning operation for which I might just be eternally grateful.

We’ll never know whether or not we spent the night with a tortoise (us on top, him underneath). To help get rid of the guinea-pig smell, Helen had left the door open, so it’s possible that he managed to sneak in while we were having breakfast or something. In fact, we discovered that he’d spent some time living there before it was converted into a bedroom, so in a way perhaps he was returning home.

What we do know is that he might be unlikely to make a return visit. The evening ended with Martin being taken to live in another house outside of the city, on the road that runs through the jungle. This seemed a bit of an extreme response at the time, but I think ours was the latest in a line of poo incidents inside the house, so maybe it had been on the cards for a while. In fact, now I think about it, it was only a week earlier that he climbed into the hifi cabinet and knocked one of the speakers on the floor. Maybe he’ll be happier out there, roaming around and chewing through the greenery.

Bye Martin, you big old plodding, chomping, stinking charmer, you.

But maybe, just maybe, I am that kind of consumer. Providing, that is, that those conspicuously ethical products happen to be cheap. And yes, I found these Eco-Sneaks in a sale.

Anyway, the shoes have been pretty good to me, but, in addition to the issues mentioned above, there is one more thing that makes them a little bit unsuitable for life in the rainforest. To limit their environmental impact, they’re held together with water-based glue. Now, this is bad enough in England, where they were largely limited to summer use, but here, where torrential downpours are at least a weekly occurence, it’s something of an issue. Therefore, after a couple of somewhat waterlogged football matches, I wasn’t that surprised to see the soles peeling away from the base of the shoe.

Farewell Eco-Sneaks, you might think. To which I say, cobblers.

In Iquitos, the trade of shoe repair is alive and well. Therefore, rather than pitch my ethical shoes in a rather less ethical bin, I was able to take them to a rather random-seeming old man sitting on a street corner, who could give them a new, super-ethical, second life. An hour later I returned to find that for the princely sum of five nuevo soles (oh the irony, but yes, that is the name of the currency) he’d completely restitched them. This meant not only that they were wearable once more, but that I’d never have to worry about them coming unglued again. And so I strolled away, glowing with ethical pride, knowing that I was probably ticking all three of the golden ethical boxes – reduce, reuse, recycle – with a single pair of shoes.

It’s a shame that the service of shoe-repair (and clothing-repair for that matter) has become uneconomical in much of the Western world, as I imagine it could do a hell of a lot to reduce overconsumption / landfill etc. But I don’t want this to descend into yet another blog about how the simple ways of a foreign land are infinitely superior to those of the ‘developed’ world.

No, all I really want to say is “Hey, look at me in my repaired, recycled trainers. You can’t test my ethics, suckaz!”*

* This is a joke. I appreciate that you probably can test my ethics, and all things considered I’d probably rather you didn’t. Don’t go calling me a hippy in the comments either.

In this country the power of the letter is so great that I don’t think I’ll be able to cover the subject in a single blog post. To give you a taste, however, here are a couple of examples.

We are based in a complex shared by a few organisations, and one has an meeting room which it hires out to the others for free. In order to book it, you have to go through the following process:

1. Walk to their office and ask if the room is free at the required time. If it is…
2. They’ll ask you to write a letter to confirm the booking
3. Return to the office and compose an absurdly formal request letter
4. Ensure that the letter is correctly formatted with the heading, logo etc of your organisation, and the mandatory phrase of that year that heads every letter, as dictated by the Peruvian government (I’ll come back to this on another occasion)
5. Print two copies. Stamp one with a stamp saying “Cargo”
6. Get someone of sufficient status to authorise both copies by signing and stamping them
7. Take them back to the other organisation’s office where they will sign, stamp and date both copies to prove they have received them
8. They keep one copy, you keep the other. I presume this is because organisations/people don’t trust each other, and therefore when someone doesn’t do what they said they did, you can wave a copy of their signed, stamped, dated agreement under their nose and go “Look! Proof!” (though where this gets you I’m not quite sure)
9. They will then craft an absurdly formal letter to confirm your booking, printing two copies and giving them to the director of their organisation to sign and stamp
10. Someone will bring these to your office for you to sign and stamp, thus confirming your reservation of a freely available room.

Congratulations. You have successfully booked a room with an organisation one minutes walk from your door. Who could believe it could be so simple?

This, however, is the way things are done. A while ago I was asked to run a couple of workshops by a colleague who sits at the same desk as me pretty much every day. I said that was fine, approved the timetable and assumed therefore that everything was confirmed.

The next day our secretary handed me six letters signed by the president of the federation presenting the week of training. On reading them I saw they were two separate invitations to run each session I’d agreed to, printed in triplicate for me to sign and date, in order that there was a copy for my records and one for those of the federation and my colleague. I turned and asked her (she was still sitting at the same desk) whether this was really necessary.

“I’ve done it for each of the trainers,” she said (and this included at least one other person sitting in the same office).

“I wanted to do things properly.”

In Peru, the letter is still king, and if you haven’t communicated something on a printed piece of paper, stamped, signed and dated with a copy for your records, well maybe, just maybe, you haven’t communicated it at all.

Incidentally, neither of my sessions took place at the time, or indeed on the day, stated on their respective letters.

“Umm…what?”

My musical snobbery means that I have a natural aversion to karaoke, but in reality I don’t dislike it as much as I think I should. Nonetheless, I always, always find it difficult to actually go to a karaoke bar. So it was with a degree of shock that I discovered that I’d somehow signed up (or been signed up, the dark hand of Helen has not been ruled out of my suspicions) for a night out to one. The situation wasn’t helped by discovering it was effectively a girl’s night out, and I was to be the lone male. I began to wonder if there was an escape route.

Happily, the after-work drinks went relatively swingingly, and our alcohol intake, combined with Helen suffering from a slight tummy bug, meant that she wasn’t up for a big night out. At 11pm I trotted the short distance to the karaoke, safe in the knowledge that we were just going to show our faces and we probably weren’t going to be there long enough to sing anything.

We walked in to a dark room, which appeared to be a bizarre hybrid of a small 70s discoteque and a second-hand funiture store. What light there was came from a small, seemingly well stocked bar (though it mostly served jugs of beer, freshly decanted from bottles) and a single, occasional disco light, emanating from the neighbouring DJ booth and occasionally bouncing off the mirrored tiles lining the walls of the dancefloor. (Dancefloor is perhaps a generous term for a small corner of the room where an arc of carpet is cut away to reveal a patch of concrete, but I’ll run with it.)

The rest of the room was filled with tatty old sofas, arranged into several impromptu u-shaped booths where groups of friends sat, each with a view of one of the three televisions. A couple of books of available songs made their way slowly round the room with accompanying torches providing the light to read them. One man swept quietly through the darkness, snatching the microphone from a person as the final words of a song left their lips, and ghosting it over to the next singer just as their track began. None of the singers got up from their sofa. Part of the fun was working out who was holding the microphone at any one moment.

Every so often, the music moved uptempo, the screens were switched off, the disco light on, and people made their way up to the dancefloor to shake their stuff for three or four tunes (no more) before the serious business of the evening continued.

I thought the place was amazing. The more I considered it, the more I realised they were on to something great. They’d somehow stumbled upon a fusion of a quiet night out, a retro disco, and a drunken night in doing karaoke in your living room. Of course, there’s only one of these that holds any appeal to me, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a big market for it. The anonymity of the darkness helped people sing without inhibitions, though staying stuck to the sofa didn’t do anything to aid the quality of their vocals.

The song book had a section dedicated to English language records, which might have been enough on it’s own to keep Helen and I entertained, littered as it was with opportunities for pedantry and giggling at funny spellings. We couldn’t begin to imagine what the apparent Carpenters hit “There’s a Kind of Shum” might be. Elton John (occasionally Jhon) did especially well with the tracks credited to him. I particularly enjoyed “Now Here Man”(?) and “You Gotta Love Bom Bone.”

As we made our way into the slightly lighter darkness of the night outside, a man grabbed us. “Where are you from?” he asked.
“England,”
“I’m from Spain. I came here years ago, met an Iquitos girl, and I’ve never left.”

With that he wandered off. A random end to a random night.

In reality, my situation at the moment is a touch difficult, music-wise. My mp3 player seems to be importing albums backwards, which is novel for a while, but has taken a bit of the fun out of some of my favourite records and obviously completely ruined any mix album with the tracks separated. (If you can’t imagine this, try getting a mix CD, skipping forward to track 10 and listening until it mixes seamlessly into track 11 at which point you immediately skip back two tracks to track 9. Then when 9 becomes 10 skip to 8 etc. You’ll soon discover it’s fairly frustrating.)

As a result, I’ve been a bit put off buying albums, and the majority of my listening revolves around downloaded DJ mixes. There have been some damn good ones already this year (those that spring to mind include the Jamie Vex’d Sunday Walkman, Ben UFO Hessle Audio Fabric Takeover, Two Fingers 25 Minute and Stoaty Freestyle Volume 5 mixes) and I have a sizable list of those that I still need to download.

The problem with this approach however, aside from the fact that it’s perhaps slightly narrowing the range of music that I’m listening to, is that downloading here in Iquitos (with a broadband connection) is both temperamental and mind-shreddingly slow.

For the entertainment of the geek readers amongst you, I’m averaging a download speed of approximately 6kbps. For those who haven’t got a foggiest what the means, yesterday I started downloading a by-no-means-massive DJ mix at around 0930 in the morning. Due to the occasional issues with the connection and my laptop, I felt I had to pause it a various points during the day, pretty much whenever I was going to abandon the computer (I have already lost too many files mid-download to risk it). Anyway, at 1830 our internet connection was shut off, and I still had 3 minutes to go on the download. Happily, I managed to pick up and complete the download this morning (which saved the guy who switched off the internet after I’d specifically asked if it could be left running for a few minutes from an unhinged mauling) and on first listen, the mix is sounding rather tasty. I might even put some kind of brief review up here soon.

So it’s a massive pain. However, as I go a bit weird without a fresh supply of tasty music, it’s a pain I have to live with.

As such, because music news doesn’t filter out here unless I hunt for it online, and there are absolutely no record shops, the music I do write about might not always be the newest, but hopefully I’ll still be able to point you in the way of a few treats, or at least explain a bit about some noises that are exciting me.

In the meantime, I’d better get back to downloading another mix, and suppressing my feverish anticipation for the Hyperdub 5th anniversary album, which:
a) is a compilation album, so it doesn’t really matter if the tracks are played in the wrong order,
b) contains “Aidy’s Girl is a Computer” by Darkstar, a song I’ve desperately wanted a copy of ever since I first heard it a couple of years ago, and
c) being a selection of some of the greatest tracks from what is quite possibly the finest record label of the moment, cannot fail to be outstandingly excellent.

Want. Want. Want.

“You could always make a post about your wonderful, amazing girlfriend,” she said.

So here is a post where someone raves about the astounding brilliance of my girlfriend. That someone isn’t me, but I’m sure that doesn’t really matter…

The number one social event in Iquitos is the parrillada. Parrillada basically means BBQ and whenever anyone has anything to celebrate, wants to have a get together, or (and here’s one of the ways it differs from a British BBQ) needs to raise money for something, they buy in a shed load of chicken and booze, send out invitations and fire up the barbie.

The fundraising element of the parrillada is something I’ve never fully worked out. Obviously the hosts do all the work and you come along and buy the food and beers at prices that aren’t massively inflated, but hopefully just high enough to make a bit of profit. I don’t think I’ve ever found out what any particular parrillada has been raising money for though. Then again, I don’t think I’ve ever asked, probably being too busy filling my face and getting tipsy.

Your standard parrillada (and this formula is followed exactly by almost everyone) will involve:
A bunch of tables in a hopefully open or well ventilated place (otherwise it can get swelteringly hot) where people sit and chat in groups.
Plates of food which feature a decent portion of marinaded chicken (possibly a quarter opened out into a flat steak for BBQing), some rice and some potatoes or yuca. Each table is also given a serving of homemade aji (chilli sauce) to add to their meal according to their taste. This is invariably delicious but occasionally borderline lethal.
A large tub filled with ice and beer (and the odd soft drink).
A soundsystem blasting out cumbia hits at a volume that threatens to blow the speakers and means that any conversation has to be shouted in order to be heard.

Another common factor I’ve noticed about parrilladas, is that they rely almost entirely on women. This is not just because the women do the majority of the cooking, but also because it is always the women who get up and start dancing, and shortly after insists that everyone else comes and joins them. This creates the party which allows the parrillada to continue once all the food has been finished.

One of our last parrilladas (they can happen with startling regularity) was no exception to this last rule, but in this case the dancing was led by a couple of particularly sozzled women, whose invitations to dance were initially politely refused by almost everyone except one person. Regular readers might guess who that person was.

Helen rarely refuses an invitation to dance, and was soon up bumping and grinding with the partially pickled pair. To be fair, I went and had a go too, but unabashedness isn’t my strong suit, so they soon got bored of my (hopefully) rhythmic shuffling. At the same time, Helen, perhaps with the benefit of a few moves from the dance classes she has very occasionally started going to, was positively wowing them. How did I know this? Well, because one of them was shouting it at everyone.

“Mira esta linda mujer. Ella conoce bailar. Aplausa!”
(“Look at this beautiful woman. She knows how to dance. Applause!”)

If this wasn’t enough, she soon got wind of the fact that Helen was working for an NGO, and her gushing took on geyser like proportions.

“Ella ha venido a Peru para trabajar con una ONG. Necesitamos mujeres como ella. APOYA LAS ONGs!”
(“She came to Peru to work for an NGO. We need women like her. SUPPORT THE NGOs!)

This announcement of Helen’s work status began virtually choking through tears before moving through shouted praise to what was basically a barked order. My housemate, who had been drinking with me and avoiding dancing, suggested we really should have got some video footage for an NGO promotion campaign.

Through all this Helen was blushing and laughing, but of course continuing to dance. I guess that’s the kind of wonderful, amazing person she is.

And I don’t always need to be stuffed full of chicken and beer and shouted at by drunken dancing women to be reminded of that.

It’s been hot in Iquitos. In fact it’s always pretty hot, but normally the temperature rises from high to very high then there’s a big rain storm and it drops back to high again. We hit very high about three days ago but there’s still no sign of rain, it just gets stickier and stickier.

It was no surprise then, when Helen’s regular weekend cry that we have to get out of the house took on a particularly impassioned / desparate air on Sunday. This week, however, she had a new idea of a place to visit.

“Were you here when Tatiana was talking about the gay beach?” she asked.
I wasn’t, so asked for more details.
“It’s not far away, and it sounds nice, but she doesn’t want to go back because last time she was followed by lesbians.”

I should probably explain at this point, that Peru is not the most progressive country in the world as far as attitudes to homosexuality go. A month or two after I arrived the BBC News website reported on how the new (now ex-, though for unrelated reasons) Home Secretary had banned gays from serving on the police force. It was described as a populist move, intended to improve the police’s image. I’ve heard talk of university professors describing homosexuality as a disease, and otherwise savvy human-rights campaigners expressing ideas that (hopefully) died out in the UK many years ago. Once I saw an entire club stop watching a band in order to gawp at four young gay men showing off their dance steps. (Though to be fair the club wasn’t that busy and we were watching them too. They were pretty amazing dancers.) In general homosexuals seem to be considered oddballs or aberrations that are kept either at the fringes of society, or in hairdressing salons. As such, our housemate’s giggling fear wasn’t anything unusual, by apparent Peruvian standards.

Anyway, the idea of hanging out amongst this excluded subculture set our righteous-traveller-sense tingling, and our anticipation was only heightened when the first motortaxi driver refused to take us there.

“Why not?” we asked.

He paused before replying.
“It’s very far. You need a more modern motorcarro to take you there.”

As it wasn’t all that far, and I’ve ridden in much more decrepit motortaxis, I took this to be code for, “I’m not going there. There are gays there. Imagine if my motortaxi broke down. Then I’d be trapped. Trapped amongst gays. Gays I tell you. Save yourselves. SAVE YOURSELVES!”*

When the second motortaxi driver dropped us off, we discovered that the beach was actually on the other side of the river, and you had to get a boat to take you across, adding even more (if this is possible) to the mythology that was building up around the place. Inside the boat, facing a friendly gay couple and alongside a gruff transvestite, I wondered we were about to discover a haven of homosexuality, a strip of land isolated from the rest of Iquitos where the gay community could meet, relax and express themselves freely.

We quickly realised it wasn’t. It was just a shit beach.

We’d forgotten the first rule of beaches. If it’s a really hot weekend, and you’re thinking wouldn’t it be nice to go and relax at the beach, everyone else is thinking exactly the same thing. The place was packed, baking, and outside of the bars (each draped in plastic and blasting out music at maximum volume which was clashing horribly with all the other bars just a few paces away) there was no shade.

We found ourselves a sliver of beach to lie on, and a tiny square of river to wade in. Unfortunately my relaxing on the former was regularly interrupted by the constant stream of soggy people dripping on me as they passed and, if I was really lucky, carelessly letting a half-chewed chunk of aguaje slip from their slackened jaw onto my exposed torso. I didn’t fare any better in the latter either, being alternately accosted by brattish kids and drunken groups of lads, each drawn to the beach’s lone gringo like moths to an increasingly irritable flame, determined to laugh at my still dazzlingly pale body before asking me to buy them a soft drink / beer / lunch.

My bubble had been burst. What we had found was not a Peruvian paradise for lovers of the same sex, but rather a noisier, minature, tropical version of Weston-super-Mare (though admittedly lacking the arcades and stuff).

Maybe we just picked a bad day, but something tells me that our quest to discover the tranquil havens or vibrant subcultures of Iquitos will be starting somewhere else.

Ah well. There’s always next week.

*This may be slightly unfair on the motorcarrista, who may have had a problem with his motorcarro.

That’s not to say that I haven’t been missing things. I’ve pestered friends about how I was suffering from the absence of good music and clubs, decent newspapers and books and the like (as well as them of course). I recently posted on Facebook that I´d been feeling Big Chill envy (which a friend told me, relatively fairly, I wasn’t allowed to have on account of my hanging out with dolphins in the Amazon).

It’s just that in the last week, things have got a whole lot more…well…pathetic.

Exhibit One
Saying “Let’s go” after finishing Tuesday’s breakfast had me musing wistfully on how much my Chinese neighbour’s cute kids would have grown. (“Letty go!” was their way of demanding I came out to the back yard to play with them.)

Exhibit Two
On Wednesday I emailed one of my closest friends who’d been rubbish at keeping in touch to effectively order him to email back. He did. Well done him.

Exhibit Three
The sight of a relatively black cat prowling around the bar last night started me pining gently for our house’s own very black cat, Lucie. There wasn’t a great deal of resemblance between the two, as cats here are generally ugly, scrawny things. I was clearly just being a saddo.

Exhibit Four
In my Spanish class today, I caught myself trying to describe in detail the topography of Sheffield (I stopped just short of an extended explanation of the steepness of Conduit Road).

Exhibit Five
Our friend Ruth’s fiance called her while we out having a drink a short while ago. He was on his way back from Fabric, and had been disappointed that there wasn’t any drum’n'bass. “Oh no,” I said, “There’s no drum’n'bass tonight” and proceeded to explain exactly who had been playing in each room. Helen stared at me. “I’ve never been to Fabric,” I sighed.

In short, I’m a soppy mess. It’s doubtless largely due to a week which has involved frustrations at work and with a variety of technology (turns out it’s difficult to get replacement electronic parts in the middle of the jungle). Just a blip then, but maybe a blip worth sharing.

Friends, family, former colleagues, festivals and possibly Fabric: I’m missing you all.

Along with steep roads, apparently.

Or so I thought.

A friend of ours recently returned from Rio Corrientes, where she had been doing some research with indigenous communities. While there, she was confronted with a problem. A man had abandoned his wife and seven children, and gone to live with a new partner in Iquitos. This left the wife without support or income, and of course still with a big family to feed. As a result, the decision had been made that the oldest son would have to seek work with the petrol company (the only local source of employment) so that the family would have some money to support themselves.

Can you guess the catch?

Yes, you need a DNI to work for the petrol company. Much worse than that, however, you have to go in person to collect your DNI, and, for some reason that I simply can’t fathom, you can’t do this in Corrientes. In order to get their DNI, which would seem to be a basic necessity for life as a Peruvian citizen, the people of the communities have to take the ferry to Iquitos, a journey which will take a minimum of two days. As well as the cost of the ticket, they will most likely have to find somewhere to stay in Trompeteros (the local administrative centre where the ferry stops, which for some unexplicable reason does not have facility to register local citizens for DNI) and in Iquitos, and of course some money for food. And they’ll need to arrange all this again for their return journey.

How was the abandoned family expected to find this money, to make this first step along the road to supporting themselves? Of course, in this particular case the finger of blame points firmly at the father, but the situation could be the same had the father died of natural causes, or been killed in an accident. There are doubtless many more families in communities throughout the country who are faced with similar problems, and cannot begin to earn, vote, or basically be a part of Peruvian society.

In this case our friend found a way to help the family, and I am hopeful that one day registration might be available in Trompeteros (I am going to look into what can be done to encourage this) but this is just one example of the neglect and incompetence that local and national governments seem to show towards the more isolated and impoverished communities of Peru. Health and education provision is insufficient, poor, or in some cases non-existent. There is currently a humanitarian crisis in the Peruvian Andes, where cold weather has caused the death of at least 433 people (figures taken from the start of August) the majority of whom are children under the age of 5. The inadequacy of the health provision in these regions has played a massive role in the appalling number of deaths from illnesses that should be preventable. (See this excellent post from Peru-based blogger Barbara Drake for more information http://americaninlima.com/2009/08/02/journalists-cold-deaths-andes/).

During the indigenous protests earlier this year, Peru’s president Alan Garcia mocked the protesters’ claims, stating that they were “not first-class citizens”, a spectacularly ill-judged comment that was seized upon by those supportive of the indigenous cause (though not to any great extent by the Peruvian media). I believed that he was clumsily indicating not that the indigenous people were beneath normal Peruvian citizens but rather that they were not the kind of special Peruvian citizen that would receive preferential treatment at the expense of others. (Which of these readings is more damning, I’ll leave for you to decide.)

The fact that nothing is done to allow people in many communities to register for the national identity scheme, however, suggests not just that they are beneath normal citizens, but that there is little desire to treat them as citizens at all.

Some additional notes
1.My despair at this situation was compounded by the fact there was an article in the local newspaper yesterday expressing concern that people were travelling on the ferries from the communities without DNI.
2.Apologies to those of you taken aback by this website’s sudden shift from its previous humourous travel blog status. There’ll be more of that in future. I suspect there’ll be more of this too.
3.Today (9th August) is the International Day of the World’s Indigenous People.

Taking all this to account, you can almost forgive the cinema in Iquitos for being quite so incredibly rubbish. It’s not the fact that the seats are uncomfortable (they’re not great, but they’re not that bad), that they always turn the lights up before the end titles, that they sometimes forget to change the reels until the crowd gets bored of watching a blank screen and starts shouting at the projectionist (I haven’t seen this happen, but think that Helen has). I can even forgive the presumably long-suffering audience for taking calls on their mobiles throughout the film, reading subtitles out loud, and shouting out what they think is about to happen in moments of suspense. What really grates, though, are the occasions when the quality of the picture or sound is so bad that you can barely make out what’s going on.

Watching Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince last night, I got a strong sense of what it might be like to watch a film underwater. The visuals were grainy and occasionally blurry, with regular flashes of green appearing at random (in a film about magic you might be able to imagine how distracting this might be). Compared to the sound, however, they were almost perfect.

Understanding Harry was just about possible. That Horace fella, whose second name I never made out, was occasionally comprehensible. Dumbledore’s mysticism was not benefitted by his sounding like he had eaten an entire packet of Werthers at the beginning of each scene. Each of the female characters appeared to have been dubbed into Spanish by the cast of Morph.

We emerged a little over two hours later with only a vague idea of what had happened, and were relieved to be reassured that it wasn’t because of our inadequate Spanish. Our Peruvian friend had barely understood anything either.

Will we be going back to the cinema? Definitely. We don’t have a TV so, with download speeds too slow to watch anything online, cinema’s become a pretty irreplaceable fix of culture for us. Plus there’s a film about a team of special agent guinea pigs that’s just come out, and Peruvians seem inordinately excited about the prospect of seeing one of their favourite pets and main courses starring on the big screen. I want to get involved in that experience.

We might avoid watching it in screen four though.