Article content continued

The next day the Canadian government put out a more general advisory for all travel. So upon landing, I paid to rebook our return tickets to cut our trip in half, and immediately rented a boat so we could have as much of the Amazon River adventure we had planned as possible in just a week. Our plan was to take a slow boat down and the fast ferry back up.

Three days downriver, the president of Peru announced a complete lockdown, not just into the country but outbound and within as well. The village we planned to sleep in suddenly became visibly frightened of us. On the way down, everyone we met had been wonderful, friendly, happy to see tourists. But that night in the tiny village of Prosperidad (not on Google maps) nobody wanted to let us stay, hostels in the nearby villages wouldn’t let us in, and people become visibly frightened by our presence, like we were carriers of the zombie apocalypse. In the end we slept in someone’s house that could only afford three out of four walls, whose poverty needs outweighed their fear. One wall was completely open to the thunderstorm that came, soaking us.

The atmosphere was so stressful, with people so clearly afraid of us being there, that my son made a half-joking-but-half-not “if we die tonight and someone finds this” video on his phone and I stayed up most of the night, practicing the Spanish for “We don’t have coronavirus. But even if we did, hurting us would just expose you to it.”

The next morning, Tuesday March 17, we left to go back upriver to Pebas, a small town with a dozen paved roads that we had stayed in on the way down. The last two hours of that boat ride were blind, in pitch dark with another thunderstorm beating the boat, but we didn’t dare stop anyplace smaller. Because the current is so strong, our slow boat needed to hug the shore. I don’t know how the boatman was able to see well enough, but we only hit one tree and not so badly that it would damage the boat.