Travel Video: The Amazon

Down the Amazon: Iquitos to Manaus by River

There are trips you plan and trips that plan you. Floating down the Amazon is the second kind. You can trace the route on a map ahead of time, but the river runs on its own clock, and somewhere past the first bend you stop fighting it and just let the current carry you. In this video, my uncle and I took our own journey down the world’s greatest river, from the Peruvian jungle city of Iquitos all the way to Manaus, deep in the Brazilian Amazon, with a final detour south to São Paulo before the long flight home.

The trip starts in Iquitos, Peru, which is the largest city on Earth you can’t reach by road. You arrive by plane or by boat and no other way, which tells you everything about where you’re headed. It’s one of my favorite cities in Latin America for sure. From there the river becomes the highway. The route runs downstream to the strange and wonderful tri-border where Peru, Colombia, and Brazil meet, Leticia (Colombia) and Tabatinga (Brazil) sit side by side, two countries blending into one dusty, humid frontier town where you can walk from one nation to another without anyone checking a thing.

This trip was prior to the border conflict between Colombia and Peru so at that time there was a lot of fluid movement between the countries. It was very much an honor system.

The stretch from the tri-border down to Manaus (Brazil) is days on a slow boat, hammocks strung across the deck, the jungle sliding past on both banks, and a rhythm of life on the river. Manaus itself is a marvel. A city of more than two million with a famous opera house left over from the rubber-boom era. It sits where the dark Rio Negro meets the sandy Amazon in the “meeting of the waters.” Two rivers running side by side for miles without mixing.

The video closes with a few scenes from São Paulo, a hard cut from jungle to one of the largest cities on the planet, before flying back home. São Paulo is truly NYC’s counterpart in South America, a huge bustling city with many different districts.

I’ll let the footage do most of the talking. Press play, and come down the Amazon with my uncle and I.

The route

1. 🇵🇪 Iquitos, Peru
2. 🇨🇴 Leticia, Colombia
3. 🇧🇷 Tabatinga, Brazil
4. 🇧🇷 Manaus, Brazil
5. 🇧🇷 São Paulo, Brazil