A chorus of high-pitched squeals cuts through the blanket of mist. We steer our skiff, bobbing up and down on the syrupy brown waters, toward the racket. “It’s a troop of squirrel monkeys,” says my guide Hulbert Paredes. “Look up in those canopies.” I crane my neck toward the Cecropia trees and catch glimpses of acrobatic maneuvers.
All around the skiff, pink river dolphins pop up for air, their taut blush bodies arcing briefly before vanishing with barely a splash. We then spot large green iguanas slinking along the mid-canopy trees on the banks of the river and hear the happy trilling of parakeets. This is the sort of ecological abundance that has long attracted travelers to the Amazon River, South America‘s liquid spine and one of the last refuges for jaguars in the world.
The 12-cabin cruiser Pure Amazon is Abercrombie & Kent’s first voyage on these waters and is part of the brand’s Sanctuary collection, which will also include the soon-to-launch riverboat Nile Seray. After 25 years in Peru, the company is setting out to not just join a tradition but redefine smart river travel with design-led interiors that evoke a boutique hotel and with five-course dinners paired with Peruvian small-batch wines. For the next four nights, we will venture into the immense Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve, snaking through the web of tributaries that interlace the basin. The journey covers 130 nautical miles, a fraction of the river’s length. But that’s enough to witness a landscape that shifts between rainforests, riverine communities, and wetlands.
Pure Amazon‘s designer, Adriana Granato—the founder of Milan-based Studio Ibsen and the artistic director of A&K Travel Group—wants the vessel to tell the story of this place and its people. Every space on the ship, she says, was designed to showcase the region’s heritage. In the cabins, artwork by Deysi Ramírez is a testament to the traditions of the Shipibo-Konibo community he belongs to. The ceilings and part of the lounge decor are fashioned from Phragmites australis, a reed used by local communities for thatching and crafting.
The clearest window into life along the river, though, comes from the ship’s staff. “Life on the Amazon is not easy,” says Robinson Rodriguez, another guide. He is referring to the seasonal flood cycle that begins in December and inundates the forest, pushing out Indigenous communities that rely on these fertile waters and wetlands. “In the low season, like we are in now, the soils bear rice and watermelon, yucca and beans. When the floods come, fish disappear into the forests and farmlands drown.”
