The Triple Frontier 2

Day two in Leticia began with another visit to Tabatinga. It was Sunday and the boat ticket office wasn’t going to be open, but we did need to get our Brazilian entry stamp in our passports, we weren’t going to get on the next boat without that. Remote land borders can often be more difficult to cross than arriving at international airports, but we had no problems here - a couple of questions about the purpose of our visit and it was done.

With the rest of the day free we went back to Leticia and got on a boat to Santa Rosa for the last time on Peruvian territory on this journey. Johnattan was carrying a small drone, and we wanted to do a bit of drone and street level mapping of the island. All of the main points of interest on Santa Rosa are concentrated on a single road, so we mapped our way up from the clutch of restaurants facing Leticia to a midpoint in the village and decided that the heat merited a refreshment stop in a friendly and spacious bar restaurant.

This restaurant became the base for an attempt at drone mapping Santa Rosa, but there was an unexpected problem. Both Tabatinga and Leticia have airports, and as Johnattan attempted to get the drone to fly at a decent height we realized that the drone exclusion area for these airports covered almost all of Santa Rosa.It was not going to happen, so we sat down for lunch - an Amazon river fish ceviche - and then finished our ground level mapping of the main street. Before the trip I had looked at Santa Rosa as a possible place to stay and decided there just wasn’t much there. But in fact it’s not a bad option if what you like is a quiet laid-back atmosphere with a backpacker traveller feel to it.There’s a handful of places to stay and enough bars and restaurants in support. And most of them are now mapped!

We headed out quite early for dinner in Leticia, the objective being a slightly fancier and more touristy restaurant we had seen. its pretty quiet on the triple frontier in mid-November, most places don’t stay open very late. But the rain came again, hard and fast - we had no choice but to take refuge for an hour in a nearby bar. Dinner for me was more river fish, gamitana this time - taking the chance to try things I may never see again. A walk back to the hostel and a relatively early night, the next day was going to be busy.