This trip is not for the faint of heart. You will get muddy, stay muddy and keep sweating for days. But you'll see sights so majestic that likely no one you'll know have ever seen. This is as off the beaten path as it gets and that is what makes it so spectacular. The amazon was our last stop on our Colombia trip after Bogota and Cartagena. Here's a video of all our stops!
We did this leg of the trip through a tour, it was about $700/person for two and a half days and two nights. Everything is included - lodging, food, activities, a local guide from the Amazonas tribes and a translator. Sergio runs the tours and speaks great English, you'll communicate with him through WhatsApp. Just to be clear though, even though it was through a tour, it was extremely rugged.
We caught and ate piranhas, stayed with a remote tribe, trekked the jungle and caiman hunted at night, saw shooting stars, the list goes on but I'll start from the beginning.
Leticia: the jumping off point
We flew into Leticia and stayed the night in Waira Suites hotel. It is important to note that this airport is hardly worthy of the name. You need to set up transportation to your hotel before getting there whether through the tour or the hotel.This first night in the hotel was not included in our tour, Leticia is the town you have to fly into to get to the tour. The hotel was the nicest in Leticia and runs about $80/night. The best part about it was the hotel's restaurant was surprisingly incredible. Some of the best meals we had in Colombia were in this tiny, far away hotel restaurant - if you don't stay in this hotel, you should still go here for a meal while in town.
Leticia is a very small town with a park where, at about 5 pm, bright green parakeets swarm. The town is small, geared towards locals, hosting maybe 5 tourists at a time, and we felt very safe wandering around it by ourselves. We even wandered into Brasil for a few minutes.
From the dock in Leticia we caught our one and a half hour boat taxi to the very small village of Puerto Nariño where our local guide and translator would pick us up. Sergio walks you to the dock and gets you on the boat, it was all very easy.
Ticuna tribe: the untouched jungle
In the small village of Puerto Nariño, we jumped on a small boat with our guide and translator, just a backpack each, to head down the river about 45 minutes to a Ticuna tribe village of about 30 people.
On the boat ride we spotted river dolphins, beautiful grey, almost iridescent ones and then the famed and absolutely spectacular pink river dolphins.
We pulled up by boat to a river bank lined with a few elder women sitting naked on floating wooden planks scrubbing clothes in the river water beside another who was gutting a chicken, throwing the entrails into the water and teaching a young girl how to do the task. The village seems almost untouched by modern day, other than a few worn Hollister t-shirts, this tribe is self sustaining, eating the fish and caiman they catch in the river, growing produce and fruit in the jungle and collecting rainwater.
This is where we spent our first night. Kevin and I had a small hut, enclosed in metal mesh with an old bed covered in a mosquito net. No electricity, but there was a toilet and a PVC pipe in the ceiling channeling the rain water collected in a bucket right above it on the roof.
We dropped our backpacks, and headed into the jungle. Words just honestly can't do justice the majesty of the Amazon rain forest. Trees that make the San Francisco redwoods look cute, covered in thorns the size of fingers, with swarms of leaf carrying ants. We saw rubber trees oozing stretchy, white rubber, termite mounds bigger than suitcases, spectacular butterflies and all kinds of crazy looking bugs and spiders. Every inch was alive and bursting with life and dangers.
We swung on a few vines that reached all the way up to the top of the out of sight canopy above. This trek was particularly difficult with all the mud - it's the rain forest so naturally it rained every day. The rain didn't stop us, but walking through that thick mud (in the rain boots the tour provided) is challenging. Whenever we would stop to talk about a tree or something we spotted on the hike, the mosquitoes would find us... but we really didn't get bit too many times. We went through about a bottle of bug spray a day and it worked well enough.
After our jungle trek, we took a seat in a dining hall hut type of structure and ate lunch: spaghetti, lentils and white rice. A weird lunch but a beautiful view.
After lunch we sat and watched the village boys play a really intense soccer game with each other - there is a league between the local tribes and they play each other so this was just practice. Then we boarded the boat again with our fishing line tied to sticks to go catch dinner: piranhas.
That night we went caiman hunting... To say it was dark would be an understatement. We were in a boat, motoring down the river in the literal pitch black - it was cloudy so we didn't even have moonlight and there certainly isn't light pollution in the area. The local caiman hunter joined us with his flashlight that he would shine in rapid swipes across the banks looking for their reflecting eyes. The directions he moved the light was a code to the driver so they never had to speak a word to pull right up on them. The hunter literally got out of the boat and into waist deep water in the amazon river to stalk to caiman, absolutely silently, jump on it and try to wrestle it into the boat. Insanity. It was too dark even for photos.
Then it was time for a relatively sleepless night in our hut. Luckily I brought a hand fan with us so we were able to lay it on top of the mosquito net to give us some air circulation in the stagnantly hot and extremely humid room. (PS click here for my Amazon packing list) The village had tons of chickens, roosters and dogs running around freely and they made noise all night long.
Puerto Nariño:
Back in the boat to head back to Puerto Nariño for the next day and night. That's our guide in the back, driving the boat. On our way, we spotted a big family of wild monkeys playing in the trees above the bank of the river.
We ate breakfast at a spot in Puerto Nariño, dropped our stuff at a hostel that was definitely better than the village hut, but still extremely basic. They did have a fan though. We took a quick, FREEZING COLD shower and headed back into the jungle to see a nature reserve with giant amazonas fish. The walk up was very muddy, steep and pretty tricky. There was a lot of tripping and almost falling - and you can't grab anything when you're falling because it's likely covered in giant thorns or ants.
There are endless sights to see in there, from the trees to the insects. We passes a village where, when girls have their periods for the first time, they lock them inside alone for months (it used to be about a year) and shave their heads (they used to pluck every hair out of their head individually).
Once at the top of the hill, we made it to the reserve and met this monkey named Pancha. She is a howler monkey who lives in the wild but was kind of raised by the humans in the house nearby. They had a pond with caimen, giant arapaima and other exotic local fish. Also the lily pads here are the size of a small car.
We didn't really catch anything but it was fun just being out on the boat and spotting pink and grey dolphins. After this we went back into Puerto Nariño to walk to a lookout over the town - keep in mind this was the larger port town and it is still extremely remote and small.
We got ice cream Popsicle things made with fresh local fruit we've never heard of or tasted.
Then we ate terrible hamburgers for dinner and decided to skip the night insect walk in lieu of getting some drinks at a few of the local "bars". After a jammed packed and exhausting few days we thought we deserved some relaxation and had really seen enough insects... We watched the sun set, bought a bottle of "wine" and a few beers and sat around on some patios, made a few friends and danced a little salsa at a nearby spot.
The next morning, we had time for breakfast, packing and then heading to the taxi boat. This trip was one we'll never forget. It was definitely the most remote, hard to get to spots I can imagine and feels wholly untouched by tourism, modern day or other cultures. Being able to experience that remote culture was the coolest thing.
If you are up for the adventure, you should definitely make the journey. I've never been more grateful for hot showers, being able to drink water out of the tap and air conditioning but we'll never forget the freshness of the air, the fruits, juices and fish, and the kind people we met there. It's truly another world and I hope that never changes.
If you are planning on braving the trip, packing appropriately was so so important so I posted our packing list here. If you have any questions, we are happy to answer them - just comment below!
*Full disclosure, a few days after being home, I had to go to the doctor because of a pretty small but pretty painful rash on my legs that turned out to be staph infection. Kevin didn't get it and I'm not sure how I did but I felt it worthy of mentioning. I'm currently on a two week does of antibiotic and it's about gone. Also full disclosure, I'm definitely one of those people where I tell my friends I got staph in the jungle and they're all like 'of course you did'. Since Kevin didn't get it, I'm sure I was just more susceptible to it and that's why I got it.
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