‘Tsk tsk.” How our guide, Neycer Pizango, heard the teeth-sucking call above our skiff’s outboards, I’ll never know – for even with engines cut, I struggled to identify anything beyond birdsong and clicking cicadas. Then a shadow moved, and a tiny, maned primate leapt, tutting, into a spondias tree’s boughs.
“It’s a pygmy marmoset: the world’s smallest monkey,” Neycer grinned. “I knew I’d heard it.”
Welcome to Peru’s Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve: a biodiverse world of extremes, where rain falls so heavily it goes up your nose, freakishly pink dolphins play in unnervingly black waters, and 4oz monkeys with 1980s mullets chatter like disapproving grannies.
Set at the Amazon river’s head and flanked by its Ucayali and Maranon tributaries, Pacaya-Samiria is accessible only by boat. During these high-water months (roughly December to May), water levels can rise by 10ft, flooding most of the forest and forcing terrestrial inhabitants, humans included, further inland.
#adventure #wilds #Amazon #roughing
