This 9-day trip takes us into the heart of the Amazon, the world’s largest remaining tropical rain forest, to experience the diversity of flora and fauna found, in many cases, nowhere else on earth.

As guests of the award-winning Tahuayo Lodge, run by Amazonia Expeditions, we’ll learn how plants, animals, and people interact in a wilderness unlike any in North America. We’ll canoe through the flooded "varzea" forest, follow peccaries' and jaguars' tracks along a trail, search for giant anacondas, fly along the longest tree-top zip-line in the Amazon, camp in the forest for at least one night, visit with nearby villagers, and swim alongside freshwater dolphins in a blackwater jungle lake.

The lodge, with more than a dozen cabins, dining area, environmental laboratory and library, and informal gathering spaces, offers the only licensed access to the remarkable Tamshiyacu-Tahuayo Reserve in Peru. Together with the Vale do Javari Indigenous Reserve across the border in Brazil, this site comprises the largest contiguous protected land mass in all of the Amazon. Tamshiyacu-Tahuayo was designated by Peru as a reserve in 1991 to protect the red uakari, the rarest of all the Amazon's incredible nonhuman primates, but now scientists believe that the diversity of all sorts of mammals—nearly 100--may be greater here than anywhere else in Amazonia! Newly discovered species of other animals, like the poison dart frogs, leaf frogs, and butterflies, live alongside more than 700 species of birds, including the incredible quetzal, fiery topaz, macaws, hoatzins, and manakins.

This project is led by science teacher Michael Pereira, who led this trip last year, and Melissa Rice, in Latin’s special Programs office. Pereira earned a bachelor’s degree in animal behavior from Bucknell University, and Ph.D. in biology from the University of Chicago. He has conducted field work in many remote locations around the world, and leads a summer program in tropical conservation in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Rice has traveled extensively in natural areas throughout Latin America.