The boatman drops me on a small wooden landing stage next to what I assume is the riverbank. “They’ll be here soon,” he says. “The lodge is up a creek and my boat can’t get there.” When he has gone, I clamber up on the bank and discover that I’m actually on an island. Orioles are perched on swaying stems of tall grass; a hawk and an osprey are watching for fish. Despite the drought-induced low water, the Amazon stretches far away to a distant shore and the smooth surface is occasionally split by a river dolphin rising for air. I have a moment of pure exhilaration. I am alone in the centre of the Amazon basin, unsure if I’m in Peru, Colombia or Brazil, but feeling that I’ve escaped such mundane concerns.
From the shimmering heat downstream a canoe appears, carrying two men. One sits upfront, a battered straw hat pulled down low over a wispy grey beard and round horn-rimmed spectacles. He looks like an intellectual who has spent a lifetime living in the remotest places on Earth. And that, as it turns out, is precisely what he is.
Diego Samper is not your usual Amazonian. As a teenager, he ran away from comfortable city life in Bogotá and spent two years alone on an island in a remote jungle river in Colombia. Exploring by canoe, he later discovered and bought the ruins of a merchant’s clapboard house dating back to the rubber boom of the early 20th century. “We called it Calanoa, spirit of the forest,” he tells me. After 12 years, his idyll ended when gold was discovered in the river outside. “In six months it went from heaven to hell,” he tells me. “Gold prospectors brought drugs and violence.” Then the Farc arrived, one-time leftist guerrillas turned criminal entrepreneurs. Diego and his young family fled. Two years later, they settled next to the Amazon, determined to build Calanoa 2 and tie its existence inseparably to improving the lives of local Indigenous people.
We motor against a strong current up a side creek. “This used to be the riverfront,” Diego says, “but the Amazon threw up a new island, so we’re now on a side creek.” It’s a reminder that Amazonia is naturally an ever-changing world. He points south, across the main river. “Not so far in that direction are tribes who are called ‘uncontacted’, although it’s more likely they are simply retreating from a world they mistrust and dislike.”
Calanoa, I quickly realise, is something of a haven. Meals are communal, often with an audience of squirrel monkeys; the staff come from the neighbouring village and are all cheerfully engaged with the place. I set off on a walk with village elder Jorge Llerena and Diego, plunging deep into the rainforest behind the lodges. Together, the two men make a rare combination: Jorge knows every animal and bird; Diego responds with a more poetic sensibility that works its way into his films and music.
In the village, Diego has encouraged a similar artistic approach, and families have responded, decorating their houses with mythical and real beasts painted over the exteriors. He tells me some of its history. “In the early 20th century, demand for rubber brought outsiders into Amazonia. The ancestors of the people here were repeatedly displaced, enslaved and mixed up with other tribes.” The horrors of that capitalist rampage were eventually exposed, largely by Irish republican hero Roger Casement, but tribal cultures had been shattered. Now, with a brilliant village museum, language lessons and other activities, people are rediscovering their heritage.
Displayed in the museum are traditional Ticuna tribe gowns, bleached white using a particular tree root. When dancing in these costumes, the people would become possessed by jaguar spirits. Ironically, the rubber barons who destroyed Ticuna culture were obsessed with their shirts being whiter than white, to separate them from “the savages”. Oblivious to the indigenous knowledge under their noses, they sent their laundry to Europe.
All too soon I’m leaving Calanoa, taking the four-hour launch trip back downstream to Leticia, the only Colombian town on the Amazon. Its twin is Tabatinga, across the border in Brazil, and people move freely between the two. This porous border has attracted the unwelcome attention of facções, Brazilian drug gangs from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo who vie for supremacy. “We don’t want them here,” one taxi driver tells me. “European cocaine-users should see the damage we suffer because of their drug habit.”
Fortunately for me, the gangs are quiet: I find only a sleepy town where locals are working hard for the environment. Mundo Amazonica botanic garden is a former cattle ranch turned into a fabulous rainforest reserve with a great cafe, and at Tanimboca Reserve, local Indigenous guides offer jungle treks. After a night in a treehouse, I go hiking with Zorro, a guide from the Murui tribe, who promises to improve my sensory perceptions by blasting homegrown tobacco powder up my nostrils with a bone pipe. It does seem to help me spot the tarantulas.
The jetty where I board the east-bound boat is my first real encounter with Brazil, and it feels very different from Spanish-speaking Peru, Bolivia and Colombia. Things are more organised, the police are taller and better armed, and sniffer dogs are deployed. For the first time I see the cocaine-trafficking problem taken seriously. An hour downriver, a police gunboat orders us to the side and one man is detained.
We halt at the infrequent towns, and fishers row around us in canoes, selling vast piles of fish. I am the sole tourist and there is little evidence that many others come this way. Even on this jet boat, Manaus is two days away. When we arrive in the Amazon’s biggest city, I rush to the rear deck to see one of nature’s marvels: the meeting of the Amazon and Rio Negro. The former’s pale water is several degrees cooler than that in the dark Rio Negro, preventing any mixing for several miles.
After visiting the famous opera house and botanic gardens (a square kilometre of primary rainforest complete with jaguars and anacondas inside the city), I travel a few hours north to Vanessa Marino’s beautiful private reserve, a place involved in scientific research as well as Indigenous culture. I take an overnight walking and camping trip with Igor, a snake and frog expert from the Manaus Institute, and local guide Chico. There are forms of life here that I never knew existed: fish-eating spiders that wait on low branches above the stream, frogs that hunt using sensors in their feet, and a fungus that takes over a particular ant, like mouldy malware, forcing it to climb a particular tree whereupon the fungus kills its host and releases spores. At dawn, I lie in my hammock, listening as the misty jungle rings with the cackles of macaws and the cries of golden-handed tamarin monkeys.
Passing back through Manaus, I cross the Amazon by water taxi and start my onward voyage downriver on the Mamori, a substantial tributary. Elso and Paula, who operate a wonderful traditional river steamer, grew up in this area. With them as guides, the complexities of the Amazonian environmental crisis becomes clear. “This land is considered worthless until burned, cleared and fenced,” says Elso. We pass long stretches of forest, the riverbank dotted with huge caimans. The ship is a masterpiece of the boatbuilders’ art and makes a superb wildlife-watching platform.
In one village, a chat with a local schoolteacher is revealing. “Most kids come from ranching families who think more cattle are better,” he says. “But to be honest this generation don’t want the hard physical work of clearing land; they’d prefer tourism jobs. The problem is we don’t get many visitors and never see any NGOs or nature projects.”
One cattle owner, Edimar, takes me on a hike into the jungle, where his youngest daughter, Stefany, steals the show by locating capuchin monkeys and sloths. When an electrical storm bursts overhead, we shelter under palm leaves while she collects fallen Brazil nut pods, adeptly smashing them open with a hefty machete. “The future of this forest,” says Elso, watching her, “will be decided in Amazonian classrooms.” For that reason, he supports the local school with materials and gives talks on conservation.
Days later I arrive in Belém, the Brazilian port at the mouth of the Amazon which is an exhilarating blend of old and new. From here, I take a ferry out to Cotijuba, a sleepy island in the delta where I take a last swim and toast the world’s greatest waterway with an açai-flavoured beer. These low-lying islands are agriculturally rich: more than 1,000 tonnes of sediment are flung from the Amazon’s mouth every minute and vegetation grows in glorious abundance. It has been a long, sometimes arduous journey, but I’ve saved more than 3,000km of flying and seen for myself one of Earth’s most beautiful and fascinating environmental battlegrounds. It’s a world where tourism can, I believe, be a vital force for good.
Kevin was a guest of Sumak Travel, whose tailor-made trips to Latin America focus on community-based and Indigenous tourism initiatives. A private eight-day tour of Colombia including the Amazon Rainforest starts at £1,785pp (based on two sharing), including accommodation, guides, transport and most meals but not international flights. Tailor-made tours of Amazonian Brazil also available, including the experiences Kevin describes.
More of Kevin’s travel stories are available at Backstory on Substack
