Before you come
Most of what you need is already included — bed, mosquito net, boots, meals, every excursion. This is the rest, written from forty years of watching what people wish they had packed.
Light, loose and long. The jungle is hot, but covered skin beats bare skin against mosquitoes and sun, and it dries faster than you think.
Rubber boots are provided, in your size, and they are what almost everyone here wears. You will walk through mud and standing water, and rubber is the only thing that keeps that out.
Some people prefer their own hiking boots for the ankle support. That is a real trade-off, and worth knowing before you decide: once hiking boots get wet — and they will — they stay wet. Days in soaked boots are miserable and can lead to infected skin. Rubber boots are available either way, and you will want them around camp regardless.
Bring ordinary shoes or sandals for Iquitos and for the evenings.
The list that actually matters.
Fly into Lima, then take a domestic flight to Iquitos. It is about two hours and there are several a day. Iquitos has no road connection to the rest of Peru, so the plane is the only sensible way in.
We leave Iquitos early — pick-up is around 8:30 in the morning. Book your Iquitos flight for the day before the trip starts and sleep one night in town. A delayed connection out of Lima is common, and it should cost you an evening, not the first day of your trip.
Plenty of hotels and hostels at every price, most of them within walking distance of the Plaza de Armas and the Boulevard above the river. Ask us and Ruber will point you at something that suits your budget, or book your own — either is fine.
You do not need to carry your whole luggage into the jungle. Bring what you need for the days you are away; the rest can stay safely in Iquitos until you are back.
We guide, we do not give medical advice. What follows is what travellers usually ask about, and the one thing worth doing.
Tell them you are going to the Loreto region of the Peruvian Amazon. Yellow fever vaccination is commonly recommended for this part of Peru, and some travellers take malaria prophylaxis. Let a doctor decide, not a website.
Real, and worse at dawn and dusk than in the middle of the day. Long sleeves, trousers and repellent handle it. Every bed has a net over it.
The food at the camp is cooked fresh every day and travellers very rarely have trouble with it. Bring whatever you normally take for an upset stomach anyway — it is a long way to a pharmacy.
Worth having, and worth checking that it covers remote areas. You will be several hours from the nearest hospital.
Ruber speaks English, Spanish and some French, so you will always be understood. But the rest of the family mostly speaks Spanish, and a few words — gracias, buenos días, ¿cómo se llama? — change the evenings completely. Nobody expects fluency.
The seventeen-day journey to the Matsés villages is a different kind of trip, and the packing changes with it.
Ask. It is usually a one-line answer, and we would rather you arrived with the right boots than guessed.
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Amazon Wildlife Expeditions