Travel: How you can explore the Amazon rainforest by boat

Fortunately, the stoic village shaman, Carola, had already read my aura as “bright white, good” before she sacredly blew on my head and blessed me while waving a leafy hallucinogenic chacruna plant near my face. I really appreciate those positive vibes since I’m in Peru’s mysterious isolated Amazon, and currently bouncing in a wooden skiff across bottomless black waters infested with fearsome anacondas, carnivorous caimans and high-voltage electric eels.

Never mind a jaguar. Soon I’ll trudge in my rubber boots through the overgrown, muddy, humid jungle and boldly face a monstrous hairy pink-toed tarantula, a teensy poison dart frog that once put my guide in the hospital, and inch-long bullet ants that can agonizingly paralyze humans. A paramedic treks with us, carrying a backpack of venom antidotes in case a bushmaster or other killer snake strikes.

Plus I’m on guard for that fabled funny-footed demonic elf  — the chullachaqui spirit — who can trick you deep past the mahogany, kapok, strangler fig and Brazil nut trees until you’re scarily lost in tangled dense woods.

After all, the Amazon is the largest, most breathtakingly exotic, myth-shrouded rainforest on Earth, spanning nine countries and housing an astonishingly diverse array of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, plants, trees and insects. (Scientists estimate 2.5 million species of bugs!) Nothing compares to dreamily drifting down the Amazon’s basin, serenaded by its unparalleled hypnotic symphony — blue-and-yellow macaws squawk, squirrel monkeys squeak, a “donkey bird” brays and suddenly there’s a splash next to our 12-seater skiff. A rare pink river dolphin! The first time I glimpse the cotton candy-hued cetacean — this one with a lavender-accented dorsal fin  — I feel like I just saw a magical unicorn.

“The possibilities are endless in the forest,” my expedition guide, Juan Tejada, assures.

I discover this firsthand during my weeklong Amazon river cruise offered by Exodus Travels Premium Adventures (exodustravels.com) aboard the Zafiro, a stylish 19-cabin floating hotel that will navigate 650 miles of the iconic waterway in Peru. (The only other boats we come across are dugout canoes with locals fishing.) What makes this more special is the 22-person Peruvian crew and three naturalists are incredibly kind and knowledgeable, with an exuberant passion and respect for the Amazon because they grew up here, many in primitive villages with no electricity or clean water. Juan, now 56 and the seventh of 10 children, recalls being chased by a jaguar and his grandfather saving him by shooting the big cat; as a tot he almost drowned in the Amazon. On one of our hikes, he points out the sharp wild cane plant his midwife grandmother used to cut babies’ umbilical cords.

“We are children of the river,” says cruise director Angela Rodriguez.

The crew is also gratefully sailing again after COVID-19 devastated Peru, particularly the Zafiro’s home port of Iquitos, where our journey begins. Iquitos is the world’s biggest city only accessible by planes or river barges, all which stopped during the pandemic lockdown. Life-saving oxygen tanks and medicine couldn’t be delivered. Juan had six family members die of COVID and his nurse wife was hospitalized. So many bodies piled up in 2020, a COVID-19 mass grave sits outside town. Angela covers her heart with both hands. “We are blessed. We are alive,” she says emotionally.

Her words resonate as I humbly explore the planet’s most fragile ecosystem, from its stunning trove of medicinal plants to its magnificent “Mirrored Forest” in the reflective Pacaya Samiria National Reserve. Each morning, afternoon, and sometimes night, I’m in the skiff mesmerized — three-toed beady-eyed sloths hang upside down for their 15th straight hour of sleep, screeching woolly monkeys hop among branches, a brush-tailed rat peeks out a tree trunk hole, an orange-headed caiman lizard lounges on a log (“its jaws have 250 pounds of force,” Juan notes), a snowy egret on the riverbanks flaunts a piranha in its mouth (“an egret kills a piranha by poking its beak into the fish’s eye and then thrashing it on the ground”). Just know much of the Amazon wildlife is way up in the thick canopy of trees camouflaged by nature, so you’ll need binoculars and an expert guide, like eagle eyes Juan, to initially spot creatures. Juan’s ears are also hyper-tuned. (“Amigas, I hear the toucans!” “The titi monkeys are nearby!”)

Throughout our voyage, we pass scattered villages of rudimentary wood huts, most open-air with thatched roofs and all on stilts because of flooding. “You can build a house anywhere and you don’t pay taxes,” Juan explains. “In fact, in 24 hours, the villagers will have built your family a house.”

These are the indigenous riberenos (river people) who subsist without electricity and boil water to drink. “They have five necessities: sugar, salt , matches, kerosene for lamps and bread,” says naturalist Daniel Vasquez. “Their diet is 80 percent fish, fried fish. They don’t drink milk, so to get calcium they eat the fish with the bones.” After giving birth and nursing, many women lose their teeth because of the lack of calcium.

One morning, as fellow passengers dangle raw beef off long sticks to catch razor-toothed piranha, three children, ages 6, 7, and 8, paddle up in a canoe by themselves to watch. Kids here are as comfortable on water as land. (But oh, does my mom radar spike!)

“People in the Amazon are 100 percent superstitious,” Daniel later adds. “They are animistic — the dolphin has a spirit, the river has a spirit. They believe in the spirits of everything.”

Carola Flores was 14 when her grandfather supposedly saw a brilliant star above her aura and knew she had the gift of a shaman. After eight years of purifying herself (no chili pepper, no salt, no sex, no animal parts), the now petite mother of three traditionally heals villagers in nine Amazonian communities. When she comes to visit us onboard, she is barefoot, with black gray-tinged hair flowing past her waist and clad in a tribal blouse and long skirt trimmed with yellow, red and green ribbons. A bad-energy-thwarting bracelet of red and black huayruro seeds wraps around one wrist.

As Daniel translates her Spanish, Carola displays various plants she uses on patients, such as wild garlic for COVID, “cat’s claw” liana roots to treat ovarian and skin cancer, and cotton leaves to induce pregnancy contractions. She pours red “dragon’s blood” tree sap into her hands, a touted tonic for ulcers and inflammation. At one point, she holds aloft the infamous ayahuasca vine, which is boiled for hours into a potent psychedelic tea for cleansing rituals. She fingers her necklace’s pendant, a flower-shaped slice of an ayahuasca branch. “Protects us,” she whispers to me in English. (And yes, I soon buy a suitcase full of Carola’s handcrafted good-luck amulets.)

During jungle hikes, Juan points to some of the Amazon’s thousands of medicinal plants. “This is the world’s greenest pharmacy,” he exclaims. Turns out I could’ve skipped the DEET and repelled mosquitoes by smearing a termite mound on my skin.

I shudder, though, when Juan motions to a tree trunk crawling with scores of bullet ants; their excruciating painful sting is said to mimic a gunshot and last up to 24 hours. Juan says after he accidentally touched one on a handrail, his arm was paralyzed for six hours. (He mentions this as we’re about to gingerly walk across eight 115-foot-high suspension bridges with cables, but hopefully not ants, to hold onto.) American scientists, he notes, have studied bullet ants to determine if their toxins can treat epilepsy.

We also scrutinize a dreaded itty-bitty poison dart frog that emits lethal venom through its skin. All the more frightening when Juan recalls that he once touched a frog, then his mouth and ended up vomiting and hospitalized for eight days. Interestingly, medical researchers have looked at the amphibian’s secretion as a potential painkiller that is hugely stronger than morphine. Next on the fascinating creepy list, we stumble upon a boa constrictor curled in a hollowed tree base and then a colossal green anaconda resting in a stream.

So much is educational and mystical — the saucer-eyed owl monkeys, the spectacled caiman, the fishing bats that swoop by us during the nighttime outing when Juan’s spotlight briefly illuminates a capybara, the world’s largest rodent that can weigh as much as a person. When we stroll through the dusty town of Nauta one day, capybara meat, with claws, is being sold as a delicacy to eat.

Back on the Zafiro, as usual before dinner, the family-like crew performs as a band — my housekeeping steward plays guitar and belts out Peruvian tunes, Juan beats the boxy cajon criollo like a drum, and the paramedic who had carried snake bite kits now joyously shakes a pebble-filled musical rainstick. No wonder the shaman saw my aura glowing.

If you go

Exodus Travels’  weeklong cruise is part of a 10-day Peru trip, starting at $8,479 per person, and including two nights at a hotel in capital Lima, roundtrip air between Lima and Iquitos, and crew gratuities.