Are you planning a trip to the Amazon and want to learn about the plants and animals that you might see? Or do you want to learn about the history of exploration in the Amazon - from the adventures of the explorers to the knowledge that they gained?

In the over 20 years that I have been involved in travel to the Amazon, here are some of the books that I have found to be fascinating reading sources.

Matteo Preabianca recently interviewed our agent Jorge Rodriguez for an article published on June 19 in the Italian publication Agoravox.  In the article, Jorge ​talks about his latest article "Environmental protection in the Amazonian communities of western Peru".

If your browser can't translate the article, it says:

You may be pondering where to go on your next vacation, since it's getting close to summertime in the northern hemisphere. Let's take a look at what your interests are and see what places you might consider.

​Leadership in destinations within the Amazon Basin has its rewards. With over 50 programs throughout Brasil, many of them in the Amazon Rainforest and surrounding regions such as the Pantanal, we cover most remote areas in South America’s largest country. Amazon Adventures has been bringing guests to Brazil’s most distant and isolated corners for over 25 years. We pride ourselves of being recommended by some of the most important travel media outlets as International Travel News, National Geographic Adventures, Brandt Guides, Fodors, USA Today and Frommers, among others. 

For many years, if travelers wanted to do an Amazon tour in Colombia, they needed to fly to Leticia, at the Tres Fronteras border with Peru and Brazil. From there, they could either do a lodge-based stay in the area, catch a cruise boat or a speedboat to Iquitos, Peru, or catch a cargo or transport boat towards Manaus, Brazil.

But when the vast majority of the FARC guerillas quit fighting in 2017,  other areas of the country became safe to travel to and it opened up fascinating areas in the Amazon made famous by the famous ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, during his explorations in the early 1940's, as are mentioned at  

Over the years, I've been asked many times if it is safe to travel to South America. I had one American guy who was planning a family multisport trip, but he had read that somebody was killed in Peru, so he decided that he didn't want to travel there or to Ecuador, Chile, Argentina or Brazil because they were too close to Peru and it wasn't safe.

I recently read an article in "Travel Weekly" where a travel consultant said:

Are your plans for a European vacation looking grim now that the European Union is considering restricting the entrance of Americans, especially unvaccinated ones? If so, here are a few reasons to consider Brazil instead:

There's no question that there are more plant and animal species in the Amazon. It is said that there are more than 1500  bird species, over 40,000 different plant species, 3,000 freshwater fish species, more than 370 types of reptiles and approximately 2.5 million insect species in the Amazon rain forest, which covers over 2 million square miles.

When the worst of this pandemic is over and people start traveling internationally again, they will want to make sure that they can do it safely. Besides thinking about airports and airplanes, they should probably also consider some things about the destinations that they are traveling to. So here are some things that they might consider:

Mamirauá was the first Brazilian Sustainable Development Reserve created by Amazonas state by governmental decree. These type of Reserves aim to reconcile biodiversity conservation with sustainable development in areas inhabited by traditional peoples. 

Mamirauá is a unique place: a complex ecosystem of lakes, lagoons, islands, levees, channels and many other formations, which forms when river waters rise from 7 to 15 meters for up to six months in the year.  The reserve itself becomes almost an island, bounded by the Solimoes and the  Japura Rivers. This causes many animals to be "trapped" in the reserve and to create unusual characteristics - like the tree-climbing jaguars.