Refugio Amazonas Tour (4 Day) | Posada Amazonas

Arrival & Reception by Guide:

Our guides are tourism professionals . They are mostly community members and are conversant in English. We assign guides at 10:1 ratio in Refugio Amazonas. This means groups smaller than 10 people will be combined with other groups under one guide. If you would like a private guide or a guide in a language other than English, please let us know.

Transfer from Airport to Puerto Maldonado Headquarters:

Upon arrival from Lima or Cusco, we will welcome you at the airport. We will be driving you to our local office. While enjoying your first taste of the forest in our gardens, you may pack your bag with the essentials you may need for the following days. You can leave the rest at our safe deposit. This helps us keep the boats and cargo in limit.

Transfer to Tambopata Boat Pier:

Skirting Puerto Maldonado, we will drive 20 kilometers to the Tambopata River Port, entering the Native Community of Infierno. The port is a communal business.

Transfer Boat – Tambopata River Port to Refugio Amazonas

The two and a half hour boat ride from the Tambopata Port to Refugio Amazonas will take us past the Community of Infierno and the Tambopata National Reserves’ checkpoint and into the buffer zone on this 1.3 million hectare conservation unit.

Boxed Lunch

Orientation upon arrival. The lodge manager will welcome you and brief you with important navigation and security tips.

Dinner

Caiman Spotting

We will be out at the river’s edge at night. Scanning the shores with headlamps and flashlights to spot the caimans.

Overnight stay at Refugio Amazonas’ superior room.

Breakfast

Oxbow Lake Visit

We will be paddling around the lake on a canoe or a catamaran. You may glance along the shores of the lakes and spot some animals like hoatzin, caiman and horned screamers. Quite rarely you may spot otters. You will also be rewarded with overhead sightings of macaws.

Canopy Tower

Thirty minute walk from Refugio Amazonas will take you to the 25 meter scaffolding canopy tower. A bannister staircase running through the middle provides safe access to the platform above. The tower has been built high above the ground. Hence, this would increase your horizon of the continuous primary forest extending out towards the Tambopata National Reserve. You are likely to get a sight of toucans, raptors, macaws and mixed species of canopies.

Lunch

Farm Visit

Five minutes downriver from the lodge, lies a farm owned and managed by Don Manuel. It is in the neighbouring community of Condenado. He grows a variety of popular and unknown Amazon crops just about every plant and tree you see serves a purpose.

Ethnobotanical Tour

Along this trail, we will find a variety of plants and trees that are used by locals for a variety of purposes. We will learn about the medicinal and other uses of Yuca de Venado, Ajo-Sacha, Charcot-Sacha, Para-Para, Uña de Gato among several others.

Dinner

Tambopata National Reserve Lectures

Night lectures prepared by the staff of Refugio Amazonas, cover conservation threats and opportunities /projects in the Tambopata National Reserve.

Superior Room at Refugio Amazonas – Overnight

Breakfast
Parrot Clay Lick
A fifteen minute boat ride and an hour’s walk from Refugio Amazonas, is a clay lick used both by parrots and parakeets. Here you will get to see both parakeets and parrots descending to ingest clays on the bank. Some rare species namely Cobalt winged and Dusky headed Parakeet also fly in here. If luck favours, you will also be rewarded with sights of Blue-headed Pionus, Yellow and Mealy crowned Amazons, Orange-cheeled parrot and some severe macaws. The best time to visit is during the day or at dawn. It is then when the parrots are mostly active.
Lunch
Brazil Nut Trail and Camp
A few minutes hike from the lodge, is a beautiful old growth patch of Brazil Nut forest. This has been harvested for decades (if not centuries). Here the precarious remains of a camp used two months out of the year by Brazil Nut gatherers can still be experienced. We will be demonstrating the whole process of the rainforests only sustainably harvested product from collection, transportation and drying.
Mammal Clay Lick
Twenty minutes walking from Refugio Amazonas, is a peccary clay lick. These wild rain forest pigs show up in herds of five to twenty individuals to eat clay during the late morning. Chances of spotting them are around 15% but well worth the short hike. Other wildlife also show up including deer, guan and parakeets.
Dinner
Night walk
You will have the option of hiking out at night, when most of the mammals are active but difficult to see. Easier to find are frogs with shapes and sounds as bizarre as their natural histories.

Superior Room at Refugio Amazonas – Overnight.

Breakfast
Transfer Tambopata boat pier to our local office:

We will retrace the river and road journey back to Puerto Maldonado to our office and onward to the airport. Depending on airline schedules, this may require dawn departures.