. . Via Its Most Dangerous Buses, Boats, Trains, and Planes THREEYour Time Comes or It Doesn’tTHE DEEPER INTO THE AMAZON Basin you go, the fewer roads there are, until they give out entirely; rivers take over, and buses are replaced by boats. According to my map, if I headed due east from Puerto Maldonado I’d hit Rio Branco, Brazil, and then Puerto Velho, on the banks of the Madeira River, from which I hoped to catch a ferry 660 miles northeast to the jungle metropolis of Manaus. Amazon ferries sank with regularity; in the first three months of the year more than two dozen people had died in two separate incidents. But to get to the Madeira I had to cut a hundred miles east through the Peruvian Amazon, and there was only one option for getting there: shared taxis on roads that looked none too impressive on my map.Tiptoeing around the mud of Puerto Maldonado, I caught a three-wheeled auto rickshaw to the Imperial Car Service. Inapari, the Peruvian border crossing, was supposed to be three hours away, but “the roads are horrible,”
