Cruise the Amazon on a Luxury Riverboat Expedition

The water is pleasantly warm but so murky that I can’t see my hands. When something slimy brushes against my leg, my imagination runs wild: piranha? Caiman? Anaconda?! This is what swimming in the Peruvian Amazon feels like—exciting and a bit crazy.

My naturalist guide reassures me that I’m safe. “You’re not bleeding, right? Then you’re fine!” he says with an unsettling grin.

Then we hear it: a droning sound followed by the distinct hiss of water shooting from a blowhole. I turn around just in time to see a glinting, rosy fin in the equatorial sunlight—a pink river dolphin. It’s like encountering a real-life unicorn.

Swimming with dolphins in the Amazon is the perfect bucket-list experience I hoped for on my nine-day journey through Peru. The first part of the trip included exploring ornate basilicas in Cusco and hiking to the spectacular Machu Picchu.

I’m traveling with a dozen others, including a statistician, a Silicon Valley retail icon, and a transcendentalist with the largest private plane collection in the world. What unites us is our love for adventure, which is why I’m eagerly anticipating this five-day cruise on the Amazon River—the longest river in the world, stretching 4,150 miles from the Andes to the Atlantic.

When I arrive in the gateway city of Iquitos, the humidity hits me like a hot, wet towel. Our naturalists for the week—an enthusiastic trio nicknamed Tarsandro, Eagle-Eye Erickson, and Jorge of the Jungle—greet us at the airport with cold towels. A few hours later, we’re cruising past twisted trees and small villages on the Delfin II, a Relais & Châteaux riverboat with 14 luxurious staterooms and a 27-person crew. Our goal? The Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve, Peru’s second-largest protected area.

On our first excursion, we head down the Ucayali River, the main source of the Amazon. With mist rising from the brownish water, a supermoon hanging like a wheel of cheese in the morning sky, and fellow passengers decked out in khaki, I feel like an extra in an Indiana Jones film. Here, it’s just us, local fishermen in dugout canoes, and park rangers patrolling for poachers. Capuchin monkeys swing from branches with acrobatic flair, giant river otters with sharp teeth dart along the muddy shore, and spotted river turtles leap into the water like synchronized swimmers. Our cameras capture a crimson-crested woodpecker with a red mohawk and a yellow-headed caracara aggressively chasing a great black hawk away from her nest.

On a night safari, Lindblad expedition leader Jonathan Aguas hopes for a jaguar sighting, but the elusive cat doesn’t appear. Instead, our spotlight reveals the glowing red eyes of caimans, speedy relatives of alligators, and capybaras, large shaggy rodents that resemble a beaver-bear hybrid.

When not exploring the Amazon by motorized skiff, we paddle its silty waters by kayak, enjoy pisco sours on its empty beaches, and trek through the dense jungle. Eagle-Eye Erickson, whose father was a shaman in Brazil, leads a rainforest hike and points out medicinal plants and magic mushrooms. He’s joined by Federico, a machete-wielding tracker from a nearby village, who finds an anaconda coiled like a curly fry on a branch and a Goliath bird-eating tarantula with jaws large enough to devour a hummingbird. (As tempting as it is, I pass on the chance to take a selfie with the oversized spider.)

We marvel at a tiny orange and blue poison dart frog and gasp at a brown-throated three-toed sloth hanging just above our heads. When a red-tail boa constrictor crosses our path, it elicits gasps and one emphatic “No thank you!” from a particularly nervous guest (not me, though I’m not taking a selfie with him either).

Despite the heart-pounding wildlife encounters, they spark lively conversations among the guests at dinner. Even our meals have their stories; for example, the baked doncella is a 20-pound tiger shovelnose catfish that the crew traded for cold sodas, as local fishermen consider the fish a gift from the Amazon.

On our last morning aboard the riverboat, I head to the top deck just before dawn. The pink dolphins are already putting on a show that feels like a special gift for me. Less than 24 hours earlier, I learned that my father had passed away from a heart attack while I was traveling. The news hit me hard, but the Lindblad team quickly helped me rebook flights to return home. His death was a shock but not entirely unexpected, and in a way, it was almost fitting to receive the news here, deep in a jungle teeming with life, where the cycle of existence unfolds daily in grand and subtle ways, always meaningful.