Hi, all.
I took a solo trip from Coca, Ecuador to Leticia, Colombia (via Iquitos) using only public transit. I'm posting relevant bits of my trip on various forums to help other travelers looking to do the same. Note that the information is pretty much the same for those going in the opposite direction. Note also that transport into/from Pantoja from/to Ecuador is largely unscheduled, so once you're in the position of needing to get to Ecuador from Pantoja, or to Pantoja from Ecuador, you just have to ask around until you find someone who knows someone who's planning on making the trip.
PANTOJA (“Cabo Pantoja” on Google Maps):
Upon arrival in Pantoja, my first stop was the immigration office. You’re going to see a massive Peruvian flag that’s taller than anything else in the village except the cell tower, and you should walk up the hill towards the flag and the immigration office will be on your left. I arrived at 3pm on a Tuesday, which was regular business hours. Had I arrived at night or over the weekend, I may have had to spend some time in Peru illegally while waiting for the office to open up. Next, I went to the general store and exchanged $50USD for 150 Nuevos Soles. I got absolutely screwed on the exchange rate. Next, I went to the hostel. There are two in town and I went to the bigger one simply because I walked into it before I walked into the other one. It was $7 per night and lacked mosquito netting. To compensate, I doused myself in so much flammable bug spray that had someone lit a match within ten feet of me, I would have burst into flames.
There is dial-up internet at the immigration office in Pantoja, but if you ask to use it then you’ll be laughed out of the room. There’s a Movistar cell tower in town, but there’s no cellular data, only call and text. This means that if you use iMessage, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, etc…, you’re gonna be off the grid for the duration of your stay. Electricity is on daily from 6pm to 11pm.
I tried to buy a ticket from Pantoja to Mazán, but there was no boletería in town. You simply hop on the boat and pay the captain. I had arrived on Tuesday, and the next boat to Mazán was due to leave on Friday. I joined up with an Ecuadorian couple who were on their way to Manaus, and together we split the cost of a jungle tour that took up most of the day Wednesday. Ask around town for a guy named Rodrigo– he’s a great guide! He took us about two and a half hours up the Río Aguarico to a turtle sanctuary, where his wife cooked us lunch. The hour we spent dolphin-spotting was a nice plus. That tour was easily the best $25 I’ve ever spent.
Although I was planning to leave Friday morning (that’s when one of the weekly scheduled fast boats, operated by the Trans Vichu corporation, was supposed to leave), there happened to be two other boats headed in my direction that were set to leave Thursday morning. One of the boats was a massive, slow cargo boat that would have gotten me to Iquitos in a week for $30. The other boat would take me to Mazán in two days by way of an overnight stop in Santa Coltilde, about two-thirds of the way down the remaining stretch of the Río Napo, meaning that I could be in Mazán at 11AM Friday and therefore in Iquitos by 1PM that same day. For $70, it wasn’t cheap, but it was the right choice.
BOAT TO SANTA COLTILDE:
Because I chose to take the unscheduled fast boat instead of the scheduled one, my experience on this portion of the trip was very different from what pretty much anyone else would experience. For starters, the boat wasn’t run by any sort of company with any semblance of a schedule. I pretty much just fell ass-backwards into it because the captain of that boat and I happened to be buying soda at the same place at the same time. It looked like it could seat a maximum of fifteen passengers plus a small crew, but there were only twelve people total (including the three-man crew). Whereas the cargo boat and the Trans Vichu boat would have stopped at least ten times at all of the settlements on the river, we only stopped twice. Our first stop was a town about three hours downriver where we got brunch and picked up a crate of eggs to be sold at the market in Santa Coltilde. The second stop was a sandbank forty-five minutes outside of Santa Coltilde because someone had to go to the bathroom. The cargo boat and the Trans Vichu boat would have had bathrooms onboard, but ours did not. We arrived in Santa Coltilde after ten hours, meaning that we made very good time.
SANTA COLTILDE (“Santa Coltilda” on Google Maps):
More so than any other place on the route, Santa Coltilde will make you appreciate the vast difference in infrastructure development between the Peruvian Amazon and the Ecuadorian Amazon. Santa Coltilde has the infrastructure of Pantoja and the population of fifteen Pantojas. It’s a hair bigger than Nuevo Rocafuerte but has no wifi (rumor has it that WiFi is in fact available for about one dollar per hour at one of the restaurants, but I didn’t bother investigating), electricity is only from 6PM to 11PM, and there’s no cellular data. Cell service is actually much worse here than it is in Pantoja, which was surprising. On the plus side, the selection of food and beverages was the best I’d seen since leaving Coca (it was here that I finally managed to track down a Pisco Sour, only to find that the Chilean recipe is much better).
My hotel was the Hospedaje Princesa. The captain of my boat had gotten the twelve of us a group discount, so we only had to part with ten Nuevos Soles per person for the night. The manager immediately tried to extract ten DOLLARS from me upon realizing that I was a foreigner, but I caught on to what she was trying to do and shut it down quickly. It was obviously for the best; the room I was given was barely worth ten soles, much less ten dollars. But for one night, it worked fine. I did, however, have to dispose of a pair of socks after stepping in a suspicious-looking puddle outside my room. I really shouldn’t have been wearing socks with sandals anyways.
BOAT TO MAZÁN:
As will most likely be the case for anyone else on this route, the boat that took me to Santa Coltilde was the same boat that took me to Mazán at 6AM the next morning. Santa Coltilde is two-thirds of the way from Pantoja to Mazán, so we only had a couple hours left to go. We got in at about 11:30AM.
MAZÁN:
We were swarmed by mototaxi drivers as soon as our boat docked, but I elected to first spend about fifteen minutes walking around the small town. Mazán was the first Peruvian town I encountered on this trip that boasted both 3G cellular data and 24/7 electricity, so I took the opportunity to send a couple of prewritten emails and then went to find a mototaxi. My gut feeling that I would get a better price finding a mototaxi in town as opposed to hiring the first guy I met at the dock proved to be correct.
BOAT TO IQUITOS:
Mazán is on an isthmus (technically a peninsula, but the geography more closely resembles an isthmus at this point) that divides the Napo and the Amazon. Depending on the recklessness of your driver, a mototaxi will take about ten to fifteen minutes to reach the Amazon side, at which regular ad hoc boats to and from Iquitos dock. For seventeen soles, I got a seat on one of them and was in Iquitos in an hour. It should have only taken forty minutes, but our engine died on us twice. Also, we stopped at a hut along the river so some passengers could buy what looked like cheese.
IQUITOS:
The boats from Mazán arrive in Iquitos at the Puerto de Productores. There is a market between the dock and the street. The only way to get into a mototaxi is to go through the market. Have you ever been in a museum, and the only way to exit is to go through the gift shop? If you have, you’ll know what I’m talking about.
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