Amazon Rainforest, Ecuador🦜

We spent four days in the Amazon Rainforest, and it has been another huge highlight for us! We decided to visit the Amazon from Ecuador as we heard it’s pretty cheap and you get the opportunity to see more wildlife for the price you pay. You can also visit the Amazon from Brazil, Peru, Colombia and Bolivia, with Bolivia being the cheapest, however, it didn’t align perfectly with our itinerary.

We booked the tour on the Cuyabeno Wildlife Centre and Dolphin Lodge website. It cost us $700 USD for the both of us for the three nights, four days package. This included accommodation, three meals a day and all of the activities. There is also an option to do a five day package as well.

We went to the Amazon straight from the Galápagos and it took us roughly 12 hours. We had to get an overnight bus from Terminal Quitumbe in Quito to Lago Agrio. We then had to get a public bus to Cuyabeno, which took three hours. All the tours for the Amazon from Cuyabeno meet at this pick up point and then you meet the guides from your lodges who organise the transport for you. Below is a detailed day by day itinerary for what our tour included.

Day 1

Make sure you get to the Cuyabeno pick up point before 11am as the shuttle boats will come to collect you between 11am-12pm, depending on which tour you do. Once we met our guide Victor, we took a river boat to our lodge, which took between two and three hours to get there. We stopped multiple times on the way spotting different kinds of wildlife. We saw all kinds of birds, different species of monkeys and even baby bats. It was such a good first couple of hours! Once we arrived at the Lodge, we had a late lunch and got our things organised in the dorms. At around 4:30pm we got ready to go on the boat again to spot more wildlife for a hour, before making our way to the Laguna Grande for sunset.

At Laguna Grande, you are allowed to swim here at sunset as it’s open water, meaning Caimens, which are small crocodiles don’t tend to swim there until dark. We did this every evening and were lucky to see such gorgeous sunsets.

After sunset, we had dinner with our tour group, which was at 8pm every evening. As we are in the middle of the rainforest, all lights go off at 10pm every day, so we made the most of the two hours, playing cards and socialising before having an early night.

Day 2

Ned and I decided to wake up for sunrise, as we heard there are chances to see pink dolphins and otters by our lodge. We briefly saw the dolphins but they are so quick, so it was hard to properly see them!

Breakfast is at 7am every morning and then we had our first big activity, which was a three hour walk through the rainforest to spot more wildlife. Equipped with long trousers, wellie boots and a tonne of bug spray we had a fantastic morning spotting some incredible wildlife. Victor, our guide even said we were a lucky group! Two highlights were the Poisonous Dart Frog, which is the size of a finger nail, so is extremely hard to spot and the Velvet Viper, which is a very dangerous, venomous snake. The whole tour group all luckily missed stepping on this snake, with its nearest anti-venom a three hour boat away.

After the walk we had lunch, played cards, jumped into the river at the front of our lodge and relaxed before getting ready to go to the lagoon for sunset, where we saw another gorgeous one.

After sunset, we then went on a 45 minute walk through the dark rainforest to see more wildlife at night. It was pretty cool but nerve wracking at the same time, as we heard a lot and saw so many different creepy crawlies.

Day 3

Day three started with a morning walk through the rainforest and a boat ride to the local village.

We spent the whole day at the local village. We met the locals, bought some souvenirs, then went to meet the village Shaman. He taught us about the history of the village community and three different local concoctions, a 50% whisky which we got to try, a perfume, and ayahuasca, a psychedelic brew.

The Shaman then explained of a healing ritual he performs on his people who are injured, and offered it to us if we had any pain. My knee has been a bit dodgy since running the London marathon in 2023, so I decided to do it. It involved the Shaman repeatedly hitting my knee and the surrounding area with jungle stinging nettles (much more painful than the ones found in the UK). This went on for 2 minutes and was extremely painful, but I kept my cool for the most part. The idea is that if you do it consistently, the reaction forces blood to the injured area, supposedly helping to heal it. I’m not sure if I buy it, but it certainly made me forget about my knee pain for a few hours.

We then had a huge feast. We were shown different fruits and snacks, which the locals eat and were taught how to make bread out of yuca (cassava root). We learnt the whole process, from pulling the ingredients out of the ground, grating, straining and sieving the yuca, to finally cooking the bread. We had this bread with our lunch before learning how to make chocolate from scratch from cacao beans. This village experience cost us $15 USD each on top of the tour, $5 USD went to the Shaman and $10 went to the village for providing us with a whole day of activities and food.

We then spent the last evening watching the sunset at the Lagoon before looking for Caimens, as they are easy to spot in the dark with their reflective red eyes.

Day 4

On our last day, we got up early to do bird watching and spotting more wildlife. This is the last activity as a group before those on the four day tour leave the rainforest. At 9am, those who are leaving get the river boat back to the pick up point in Cuyabeno, which is where you can get your bus or transfer to your next destination.