Your trip begins at the Cuyabeno River Bridge around 11:30 in the morning, where you meet your guide and climb into the canoe for the ride to the lodge. The journey takes about three hours along the river, and you’re already watching for monkeys and birds long before you arrive.

After lunch and time to settle in, you head back out to explore the river and the lagoon, swim if you feel like it, and watch the sun go down. Once it’s dark, you go out again by canoe to look for caimans along the banks, and after dinner your guide shares the stories behind the place, the culture, the wildlife, and the work of keeping the reserve the way it is.

After breakfast you set out on a walk of around four hours through the primary forest, where your guide reads the jungle for you, the medicinal plants, the frogs and insects, the birds you would never spot on your own. You come back for lunch and a little downtime.

In the afternoon you take a traditional rowing canoe into the quieter creeks, drift toward the sunset, and if the river is kind, watch for pink dolphins. After dark there’s a night walk, and later, over dinner, a tasting of traditional Amazonian drinks.

This is the morning the five-day tour is really built around. You set out in a traditional rowing canoe and move through the streams and the flooded forest in near silence, going slowly enough that more turns up, more monkeys and birds, sloths, dolphins, the things you tend to miss at any faster pace.

After lunch and some downtime, you roast and grind cacao and coffee the way the local families do, and taste them fresh. After dinner there are talks, or a spot out in the forest where you can sit for a few hours or stay the whole night with the sounds of the jungle.

After breakfast you head to the Siona community, where a local woman welcomes you and shares her way of life, the language, the food, and the everyday of living in the forest, and together you prepare lunch. In the afternoon you spend time with the community’s shaman, who passes on what he knows about the medicinal plants and the rituals of the Amazon.

You return to the lodge for dinner, and the night finishes with a walk into the forest.

You head out early one last time to look for birds and watch the sunrise come up over the river, then return to the lodge for breakfast and to pack.

The way out is the way you came in, by canoe down the Cuyabeno, with a couple more hours to spot whatever the forest feels like showing you, until you reach the reserve entrance late morning and your transport on toward home.