After spending a couple of days in Lima, Peru, we headed to the Amazon for 4 nights. We flew from Lima to Iquitos, where we took a 50 minute boat ride up the Amazon to a Lodge deep in the Peruvian Amazon. Iquitos is a city of over a million people and is only accessible by boat or plane. The Amazon River is the longest river in the world at over 4,300 miles long. We are about 2,000 miles from the headwaters and 2,300 miles from the Atlantic Ocean.
Right now, this stretch of the Amazon is about 1 mile wide. In May, at the end of the rainy season, the water level will rise ~20 feet and the river will swell to nearly 4 miles wide.
Highlights included:
Fishing for piranhas. The lodge cooked up our catch for lunch, which were more bones than meat.
Visiting a local indigenous tribe, the Yagua’s, who explained their culture and trained us to use their blow guns.
Seeing both types of fresh water dolphins found in the Amazon along with numerous monkeys, birds, sloths and other wildlife.
On our last full day, we took a boat up the Amazon a short distance to the nearest town of Indiana, where we caught a three-wheel taxi for twenty minutes, then we boarded a small boat and cruised for about an hour up the Napo River, the largest tributary of the Amazon. From there, we hiked for an hour through the thick Amazon jungle to the world’s longest canopy walkway. The 1,500-foot-long canopy walkway, at its highest, was 136 feet above the forest floor.
