People and noise

You…

I wanna take you to a gay beach.

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.

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