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THE AMAZON RIVER doesn’t officially acquire its name until
the Ucayali River joins the Marañón near Iquitos, more than
700 miles northwest of the Tambopata. I found a room built in
the crook of an ironwood tree, 50 feet off the forest floor at the
Treehouse Lodge, on the banks of the Yarapa, a tiny blackwater
tributary of the Ucayali that is a couple miles upstream from
the Amazon confluence.
With my guide, Alex, I visited Puerto Miguel, a nearby vil-
lage that had been ravaged in recent years by flooding, even
as rains had decreased in these lowland areas. Most families
had relocated to higher ground, but we found Raquel Inuma, a
44-year-old mother of five, in one of the last homes still standing.
“There’s less rain than there used to be. We feel it,” Inuma said.
“It’s sunnier now, and more sun is good.”
At sunset, we took the boat into the Ucayali and watched pink
dolphins swim by as the sun went down beyond the rainforest
and the sky turned a fiery orange. The broad river grew calmer
now. I looked around at the emptiness and felt lost in a kind of
nowhere zone, 1,000 miles from the glaciers of Ausangate and
3,000 miles from the Atlantic. The river would enter Brazil in
about 300 miles, multiplying in volume several times over on
its way to the ocean and becoming something unrecognizable
from the waterways I traveled over the course of two weeks in
Peru. It felt too big to comprehend.
Alex had tried to sum it up earlier, when we had stopped at the
massive and churning confluence of the Ucayali and Marañón.
He stood up in the boat as it pitched back and forth and spread
his arms wide. “This is it,” he shouted. “This is the Amazon. The
king of all rivers.”AUSTIN MERRILL ( @austin_merrill) is a co-founder of Everyday
Africa and The Everyday Projects. He frequently writes about
the intersection of travel and the environment. MAX CABELLO
ORCASITAS is an award-winning Peruvian photojournalist based
in Lima. This is his first feature for Traveler. This story was pro-
duced in collaboration with the Wall Street Journal.