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At the "island" city of Iquitos , by far the largest and most exciting of Peru's jungle towns, there are few sights as magnificent as the River Amazon . It's tributaries start well up in the Andes, and when they join together several hours upstream from the town, the river is already several kilometres wide, though a mere 116m above sea level. The town's location, surrounded in all directions by brilliant green forest and hemmed in by the maze of rivers, streams, and lagoons, makes it easy to imagine the awe that Francisco Orellana, the first white man to see it, must have felt only 450 years ago. Most people visit Iquitos briefly with a view to moving on into the rainforest but, wisely, few travellers actually avoid the place entirely. A busy, cosmopolitan tourist town with a buzzing population of about 300,000, connections to the rest of the world are by river and air only - Yurimaguas, the end of the road from the Pacific coast, is the nearest road to Iquitos. It's the kind of place that lives up to all your expectations of a jungle town, from its elegant reminders of the rubber boom years to the atmospheric shanty-town suburb of Puerto Belen , one of Werner Herzog's main film locations for Fitzcarraldo and where you can buy almost anything, from fuel to ayahuasca. Tourist facilities here have developed gradually over the last thirty years and the town has a friendly cafe- and club-life, interesting museums and beautiful buildings, and the surrounding region has some great island and lagoon beaches, a range of easy excursions into the rainforest, and the possibility of continuing down the Amazon into Colombia or Brazil. The area has also become something of a spiritual focus, particularly for gringos seeking a visionary experience with one of the many local shaman who utilize the sacred and powerful hallucinogenic ayahuasca vine in their religious psycho-healing sessions.
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