When I first moved to Iquitos, a city deep in the Peruvian Amazon, I felt farther from home than I’d ever been.

Nothing was familiar. Motos screeched around corners—many with small children, many with women nursing babies. It was 100 degrees, but people stood on sidewalks grilling whole fish. Cumbia rhythms poured through windows.

Yet in all that novelty, I saw something I recognized:

My last name.

Not one but several bars were called El Bunker.

🤔

The first couple times I saw an El Bunker, I was amused. A glitch in the matrix!

Then, baffled. What was my name doing on these ramshackle, tin-roofed bars deep in the Amazon—some in Iquitos; but many in remote villages of fewer than a hundred people, only accessible by boat, where the primary language is Kukama or Bora?

When they learned my last name, people often got excited. “Really?” they said. Big smiles. “Que chereve! That’s so cool!”

“But WHY?” I asked, and finally someone told me: Jefferson Farfán, a Peruvian soccer player, named his second apartment “El Bunker.” It’s where you go relax, have fun, party.

“It’s a good thing,” my friend Olga assured me. “A really good thing.”

🍻

What to make of this?
(To make anything at all?)

One option:

Amazon magic, which creates little coincidences like this all the time.

A wink from the rainforest. Or the Chullachaqui messing with me.

🌱

Or another: Maybe we’re never as far from home as we think.

Maybe no matter how far you go, you’ll still find reminders of your own life.

Breadcrumbs from your past, or from God.

Personal assurances, if you choose to take them that way, that the world is full of surprise and mystery…and familiarity.

🌎

Have you ever traveled somewhere that felt completely foreign—only to stumble on something weirdly, unexpectedly familiar?

If you feel called to write about your travels—whether to another country or the corner store—you might want to join The Memoir Circle.

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