La Pedrera

There is a twice-weekly flight from Leticia to La Pedrera in a twelve-seat prop plane that crosses approximately two hundred and fifty kilometres of unbroken Amazon forest. I spent the whole flight pressed to the window, looking for a gap in the canopy, a road, any evidence of human interference with the green. I found almost none. Two brown rivers, one wider than the other. A thin white line that might have been a trail. Then the grass airstrip appeared in a clearing, and we came down onto it, and the engine cut, and the pilot walked off in the direction of a building that was not visible from the air, and I was standing in La Pedrera.

The town of perhaps two thousand sits on a high bank above the Caquetá river, its wooden houses arrayed along unpaved streets that run parallel to the water. The Caquetá here is not the Amazon — it is a different river, darker, narrower, with a different smell and a different set of sounds, its banks lower in some places and dramatic in others where the water has carved red sandstone formations worn smooth. The rapids called Angosturas del Pescado are thirty minutes upriver by motorized canoe, and they are the reason the area has the name La Pedrera — rocky shoals breaking the brown water into white chaos at certain water levels.

I arrived in the dry season, when the river was low enough to expose the rock formations and make the rapids impassable by loaded cargo boats — which is why supply flights come twice a week rather than just once, and why the tienda by the dock had no cooking gas for three days running and everyone was managing fine. The economy of La Pedrera is principally fishing and small-scale agriculture, supplemented by the commerce that comes from being the regional hub for a dozen smaller communities accessible only by river further into the Caquetá and its tributaries. Canoes arrive and depart from the dock continuously, and the dock is the social centre — where people wait, talk, sort fish, negotiate, and watch the river.

I spent two days here without a particular agenda, which is the appropriate pace for La Pedrera. A man named Aurelio lent me a canoe and paddled me upstream to show me the rock paintings — petroglyphs carved into the sandstone face of a cliff above the water line, geometric patterns and human and animal figures that no one I asked could date precisely but that predate the Spanish presence on this river by centuries at minimum. He treated them with the casual respect of someone who has known they were there his entire life — not reverential, not touristic, just present. He pointed out a specific figure that looked like a person with raised arms and said his grandfather had told him it represented a shaman calling rain. He did not say whether he believed this.

The nights were remarkable. La Pedrera has electricity from a diesel generator that runs until midnight, and after that the darkness is complete and the sky produces the kind of star display that requires the absence of light pollution across a two-hundred-kilometre radius to generate. I lay in a hammock on the wooden terrace of the place I was staying and watched the Milky Way move across the sky above the canopy, and howler monkeys called from somewhere downstream, and the river was audible even at this distance, and the whole thing felt as remote as it actually was — which was, by most measures, extremely.

When to go: La Pedrera requires advance planning. The twice-weekly flight from Leticia fills quickly; book through local operators. Dry season (December–February) exposes the rock formations and makes river travel more comfortable. Wet season (June–September) floods the forest and makes canoe travel through the flooded margins possible. Carry cash; there are no ATMs.