Peruvian Amazon | JOURNEYS
There should be a word for the feeling that hits when you step onto the tarmac of somewhere you've never been before. When the atmospheric conditions of somewhere new infiltrate all your senses at once. Here, now, the night air is swollen with humidity and I taste it as I breathe in – sweet, swampy and deep green. A huge orange moon is hung low in the sky, presiding over a rainforest domain. I've landed in the Amazon. A neon butterfly dances a path through the beige baggage hall and I ascribe a talismanic quality to it: a messenger sent from the jungle to portend my wild adventure to come.
WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE
It's approaching dusk the next day when I arrive in Nauta, a small riverside town south of Iquitos (the Peruvian Amazon's biggest city that I'd own into last night, accessible only by air and river) to embark on our cruise. We pull up at the pier as the light is fading and a storm is brewing. Within moments we are loaded into a skiff and cast out to the river. The water swallows us whole. “Welcome to the Amazon!” our naturalist guide Juan Luis Ihuaraqui Silva cries with a jubilation in his voice that tells us he's home. And, for the next four nights, so are we.
We pull up alongside , Aqua Expeditions’ newest river ship. Built in 2020, it is one of two to sail the Amazon (the luxury cruise line also plies the waters of the Mekong, Galápagos and East Indonesia). Brought to life by Noor Design with the feel of a boutique hotel, this intimate ship takes its name, and its sleek, dark lines, from the black-water creeks we will
