How to Travel to the Amazon Rainforest

The Amazon River alone spans across a 1,000 mile area of South America, and the Amazon rainforest is larger than all of Europe. To see everything there is to see in this great mass of land might take more than a lifetime, but with careful planning, and by not choosing travel choices that exploit the environment, you can see many of the sites that the Amazon rainforest has to offer in just one trip. Traveling to the Amazon rainforest does require visiting some interesting lands, primarily in the countries of Brazil and Peru.

Instructions

1

Travel to the country through which you wish to enter the Amazon rainforest. The two main countries are Ecuador and Brazil, according to Amazon Rainforest.org.

2

Take a bus or small plane to the Amazon rainforest from Quito, Ecuador, if you chose to travel to Ecuador. Take a flight from Brazil to Manaus or another Amazon city if you chose to travel to Brazil. You can get an international flight to either Sao Paulo, Brazil or Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

3

Arrange to travel through the Amazon rainforest by boat. Many small companies and tour groups are available for this service.

4

Find a boat that will travel through the Amazon tributaries, rather than a passenger ship that stays along the main river. There are thousands of rivers that enter the Amazon River. Navigating these areas, rather than just the main river, will allow you to see more of the wildlife and other sites you came to see. Traveling by motorized canoe is another option for getting to these more remote places.

5

Find the right type of boat for the trip you want to take. Smaller boats, called "voadeira," take about a dozen people on day trips around many exotic parts of the Amazon. Longer trips can be taken on wooden boats that often carry hundreds of passengers, but that might not go into the more remote places of the rainforest. Foot tours through villages are available on longer trips.