The Anakonda: Five Days on the Most Luxurious Ship in the Amazon

The Amazon river system is not something you navigate casually. It drains an area roughly the size of the continental United States, moving a fifth of all the fresh water that flows into the world’s oceans, and in the Ecuadorian section where we were travelling, the river and its tributaries flow through a landscape so dense with life that the forest along the banks registers not as individual trees but as a continuous green wall, the water level changing by up to eight metres between wet and dry seasons, entire forest floors submerged for months at a time and then re-emerging. The river is not dramatic in the way that mountain landscapes are dramatic. It is overwhelming in the way of things whose scale is simply too large to hold all at once.

The Anakonda was eight months old when we boarded, a river vessel built to a standard that the word luxury doesn’t quite capture, partly because luxury in the context of a ship on a remote Ecuadorian river tributary involves considerations that land-based luxury doesn’t: the water supply, for instance, drawn directly from the river and treated on board to a standard suitable for washing, showering, and brushing teeth, with bottled water for drinking, the entire system managed with a consciousness about environmental impact that the Amazon’s situation makes not optional but necessary. The ship carried a crew of ten for facilities that included a jacuzzi suite, a sun deck, dining room, and bar, and on this particular trip the crew was serving exactly two passengers, since we had arrived in the low season and the ship was newly launched enough that word of its existence hadn’t fully circulated yet. We had the Amazon’s most luxurious vessel to ourselves, which produced a quality of service that would be difficult to replicate in a hotel.

We had the Amazon's most luxurious vessel to ourselves, which produced a quality of service that would be difficult to replicate in a hotel.

Freddy, our guide who had met us at Coca airport, came on board with us and structured the days around the tides and the light: morning canoe trips into the smaller tributaries while the forest was active with birds and monkeys, afternoon hikes into the forest interior, evening boat trips to look for cayman on the banks. The rhythm of it was determined by the river and the forest rather than by us, which is the appropriate arrangement and one that takes a day or two to settle into if your normal life is organised differently.

The Amazon basin contains an estimated ten percent of all the species on earth. The number is contested and depends significantly on definitions, but it is not wrong by an order of magnitude: the biodiversity here is of a different kind to anywhere else on the planet, the density of species per hectare in some sections of the forest exceeding what the entire continent of Europe contains. This is the result of the Amazon’s age, the relative stability of its climate over millions of years while other ecosystems were disrupted by ice ages and tectonic activity, and the extraordinary vertical complexity of a forest that creates distinct ecological zones from the floor to the canopy, each inhabited by different communities of species in overlapping layers of interdependence. The forest is not a backdrop. It is the protagonist. Everything else is happening inside it.

The suite had a jacuzzi. I used it on the second evening, looking out at the river in the dark while the sound of the forest came across the water with the constancy of something that has been going on for longer than human ears have been there to hear it. This is perhaps the most efficient description of what five days on the Amazon produces: not transformation, not epiphany, but a recalibration of what ordinary silence sounds like, which you carry back to cities and find slightly changes how they register.

This is perhaps the most efficient description of what five days on the Amazon produces: not transformation, not epiphany, but a recalibration of what ordinary...

dave@launchcx.com

A British ginger seeing the world one questionable decision at a time. Based wherever the wifi works.

The Anakonda: Five Days on the Most Luxurious Ship in the Amazon

“It is overwhelming in the way of things whose scale is simply too large to hold all at once.”

This is perhaps the most efficient description of what five days on the Amazon produces: not transformation, not epiphany, but a
recalibration of what ordinary silence sounds like, which you carry back to cities and find slightly changes how they register.

Amazon River, Ecuador

The Anakonda: Five Days on the Most Luxurious Ship in the Amazon

“It is overwhelming in the way of things whose scale is simply too large to hold all at once.”

This is perhaps the most efficient description of what five days on the Amazon produces: not transformation, not epiphany, but a recalibration of what ordinary silence sounds like, which you carry back to cities and find slightly changes how they register.

Amazon River, Ecuador

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This is perhaps the most efficient description of what five days on the Amazon produces: not transformation, not epiphany, but a
recalibration of what ordinary silence sounds like, which you carry back to cities and find slightly changes how they register.