DAY 1 Transfer Airport to Puerto Maldonado Headquarters. Upon arrival from Lima or Cusco, we will welcome you at the airport and drive you ten minutes to our Puerto Maldonado headquarters. While enjoying your first taste of the forest in our gardens we will ask you to pack only the necessary gear for your next few days, and leave the rest at our safe deposit. This helps us keep the boats and cargo light.
Skirting Puerto Maldonado, we drive 20 kilometers to the Tambopata River Port, entering the Native Community of Infierno. The port is a communal business. Box lunch.
The forty five minute boat ride from the Tambopata Port to Posada Amazonas will take us into the Community´s Primary Forest Private Reserve.
Upon arrival, the lodge manager will welcome you and brief you with important navigation and security tips.
Dinner. Overnight in Posada Amazonas
DAY 2
Posada Amazonas After breakfast, we will explore the Tres Chimbadas Oxbow Lake: Tres Chimbadas is thirty minutes by boat and forty five minutes hiking from Posada Amazonas. Once there you will paddle around the lake in a catamaran, searching for the resident family of nine giant river otters (seen by 60% of our lake visitors) and other lakeside wildlife such as caiman, hoatzin and horned screamers. Lunch.
After lunch we will enjoy an Ethnobotanical tour: A twenty minute boat drive downriver leads you to a trail designed by the staff of the Centro Ñape. The Centro Ñape is a communal organization that produces medicines out of forest plants and administers them to patients who choose their little clinic. They have produced a trail which explains the different medicinal (and other) uses of selected plants. Dinner.
As optional, you will have the chance of hiking out at night, when most of the mammals are active but rarely seen. Much easier to find are frogs with shapes and sounds as bizarre as their natural histories. Overnight in Posada Amazonas
DAY 3
Posada Amazonas Today, early before breakfast, you will have the chance to observe the Parrot clay lick. This clay lick is only a twenty minute walk from Posada Amazonas. From a blind located about twenty meters away you will see dozens of parrots and parakeets descend on most clear mornings to ingest the clay on a river bank. Species such as Mealy and Yellow- headed Amazon, Blue-headed Parrot and Dusky headed Parakeet descend at this clay lick. The clay lick is active at dawn, during the late mornings and mid-afternoons.
Return to the lodge to have breakfast.
After that, we leave from the lobby at Posada Amazonas and embark on a two hour hike crowned by the largest tree in the vicinity: a giant ceiba tree. During the hike we will focus on the natural history of the rain forest and its principal taxonomic groups. Lunch
After lunch we will visit the farm. A thirty minutes boat drive downriver takes us to the most complete farm in the community of Infierno. The owner grows a diverse variety of popular and unknown Amazon crops. In his garden, just about every plant and tree serves a purpose. Dinner Overnight in Posada Amazonas
DAY 4
Posada Amazonas-Puerto Maldonado After breakfast we will retrace our river and road journey back to Puerto Maldonado, our office and the airport.
No additional services at this moment.
ABOUT AMAZON - TAMBOPATA
[Click on map to see large version]
Discover the worlds largest wildlife sanctuary, the Amazon forest, where birds as the macaw and other exotic and unique ones will guide you through this magical experience. Enjoy with us this Ecological Paradise, an unforgettable experience.
The Tambopata National Reserve
The Tambopata National Reserve is a 275,000 hectare conservation unit created by the Peruvian govemment in 1990 to protect the watersheds of the Tambopata and Candamo rivers. It is adjacent to the huge 1 millon hactare Bahuaja Sonene National Park.
Whilst the reserve was created with an underlying philosophy of sustainable resource use, the park was created with the purpose of wholeheartedly protecting the forest within. Both units protect some of the last untouched lowland and premontane tropical humid forest in the Amazon. This Connecticut-sized (or Switzerland-sized) area of pristine forest contains 1300 bird species, 32 parrot species (10% of the worlds total), 200 mammal species, 1200 butterfly species and over 10,000 species of vascular plants.