The Peruvian Amazon: Great with a Caution

We love travel, especially travel to exotic locations with plenty of wildlife and birds.  The Amazon, or at least the upper or Peruvian Amazon, seems the perfect fit, and so we booked a trip there with our favorite travel company, Natural Habitat Adventures.  It was a great trip in most ways, but the way it wasn’t is a lesson for senior travelers.

The Amazon river is the largest river system in the world, with a single tributary being the size of some of the other major rivers on the list.  In the main part of the Amazon, around Manaus in Brazil, the river can be 20 miles wide, making it almost impossible to really see and enjoy.  We had traveled to Brazil’s Pantanal with NatHab before, and on one such trip talked with others who’d done an extension cruise out of Manaus.  They didn’t like it at all, and so we passed on the Amazon till the new Peruvian Amazon trip came along.

The NatHab trip is out of Iquitos in Peru, a city in the jungle that’s accessible from the outside world only by river or air.  The river at Iquitos, and above it into the Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve, is narrower and far more interesting.  The reserve itself is largely marsh or underwater in the high-water season (March-May), but more ground is exposed during low water, which comes roughly when we were there, at the end of September.

The weather is obviously hot and humid, and there’s not much variation in temperature through the year since it’s only about 5 degrees south of the Equator.  There’s generally a bit less rain in the low-water period, but the water comes from up in the Andes and not from the sky, so the water levels and rainfall aren’t related.  We got lucky, with just a few heavy rains at times when it didn’t impact activities to any significant degree.

The trip is based on the Delfin II, a riverboat that can support about three dozen passengers, though we had only two dozen aboard for our cruise.  There are suites and cabins, with the former being very large and comfortable and the latter being adequate and not unusually cramped.  There are bathrooms in the cabins, but none in the public areas of the ship.  Meals are served on the second deck dining area, which is spacious, and there’s an open upper-deck bar and seating area too.

You get off (and back aboard) the ship via metal skiffs that hold perhaps a dozen people.  There’s only one seat on each side, so everyone gets a decent view.  We ran three skiffs, which meant we had plenty of space.  There are stairs in each skiff leading up to a platform in the bow, from which you get on and off.  Nobody seemed to have any real problem with the boarding/debarking process, either from the ship or ashore, and the crew was incredibly attentive and helpful.

In high water, skiffs are your window on wildlife because you can’t get ashore in many areas to walk.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing, because with temperatures hovering in the low to mid ‘90s and humidity of 90 to 100%, walking can be uncomfortable.  We did skiff excursions, but also did some walks, and in my view if you want to see birds, you’d make out better on skiffs.  Note though that since the skiffs were used to take people ashore, we weren’t offered a choice of walk or skiff.

Now for birding and wildlife.  There are almost no terrestrial mammals in the area, because it’s underwater part of the year.  There are birds, monkeys, and sloths, of course, and you can expect to see a lot of the first and a decent number of the other two groups.  My wife and I agreed that while the birding wasn’t as good as in the Pantanal, there were new varieties to be seen and so for birders it’s definitely a worthwhile trip.  We added quite a few lifers on the trip.

Photography is challenging.  Birds are always the hardest thing to photograph, and in the Amazon, you tend to have thicker cover to contend with, making it harder to get a clear shot and making it darker and harder to keep a decent ISO and shutter speed.  You also end up shooting many birds up against the sky, which means you need to expect silhouettes unless you do something to compensate for the backlighting.  Skiffs with people in them, moving around, aren’t the ideal camera platform either, so be patient and check your settings carefully.

Now for the issue we had.  As I said, it’s hot and humid in the upper Amazon, so you have to hydrate like a son-of-a-gun.  Our clothing was often soaked with sweat on hikes, and on the skiffs the sweat evaporated to make it difficult to know if you were drinking enough.  I probably drank 24 oz of water with electrolytes on each outing, and on some walks almost a quart.  If you have a small water bottle, this isn’t the place to bring it, and if you have any nausea or diarrhea that can combine with the heat to put you at some risk.

Which happened to us.  I got sick with both the “v” and “d” words, but I was careful to drink a half-pint of water after each episode, so while I was weak and tired, I didn’t miss any outings.  My wife got sick a day later, and in her case was unable to keep liquid down.  She dehydrated, and when they tried to start an IV aboard (they have a medical tech aboard), he couldn’t get the line in because her veins are small and blood pressure was low.  As a result, we had to evacuate her back to Iquitos, which fortunately wasn’t too far at the time.  It still took two boats and a taxi, for a combined four hours, to each the clinic.  They finally got an IV in and she recovered quickly.  We then had to stay in a fairly down-market hotel overnight because it was too dark to safely navigate on the Amazon.

The moral here is that if you know you have a problem with someone getting an IV line in you, or even have problems when someone takes a blood sample, this trip may pose some unexpected and serious risks.  My wife went from being nauseous in the AM to being on an emergency evacuation six hours later.  It was very frightening; the worst experience we had on a trip.  My recommendation is that if you have problems with IVs and aren’t good at hydrating even when you’re very nauseous, you shouldn’t do this trip.  They told me they’d have called in a float plane for evacuation had we been further upriver, but make no mistake this is out in the wild and emergency care may be hard to come by.

A number of the passengers got sick with something, and the locals (including the doctor at the clinic) blamed the malaria medication (Malarone or the generic).  They said that there was no malaria in the upper Amazon and so taking it was unnecessary, and it caused side effects.  OK, but we’ve been on probably a dozen different trips where we took Malarone, often for almost a month, and never had any reaction at all.  So, on this one trip a half-dozen get one?  I don’t think so.  If you have an anti-nausea drug you like, like Gravoll, I’d suggest you bring some and use it aggressively if you get nauseous.  Then, hydrate no matter how bad you feel.

It’s hard for me to put aside the terror that my wife’s problem caused us, but if it hadn’t happened we’d surely have said this was a very good, perhaps even great trip.  For a fit senior confident in hydration and dealing with stomach/gut issues, it would be fine.  If you have mobility problems and hydration problems and still want to see the Amazon, I’d suggest you try for higher-water times so you’re more in the skiff than walking.

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