River Run Through The Amazon

An extraordinary quest traces the mighty river from peaks to jungle

- Austin Merrill

We left Cusco at dawn, heading southeast toward Bolivia. Breakfast was at a roadside café an hour into the drive, black coffee and a large bowl of chicken stew—a thigh and a drumstick in a tangy broth of ginger and lime, with chunks of potatoes and corn kernels the size of my thumbnail. My glasses fogged as I ate. Then we bundled back up and drove a few minutes more to the village of Checacupe, turned off the asphalt onto a dirt track and began to climb into the Andes.

I had come to Peru for the Amazon, having ditched my initial plan of travelling its broad waterways in Brazil because I was drawn to the geographical contrasts on the Peruvian side of the border. I wanted to see how the great river came together. Trekking to the source wasn’t feasible—the location is still somewhat under dispute and isn’t easy to reach—but I could approximate the general trajectory of the water, follow the flow of tributaries, from the high Andes down into the rainforest, in an attempt to understand the ecosystem of the largest river in the world.

The Amazon hasn’t always dumped its muddy waters into the Atlantic. It was a network of rivers that flowed west until... roughly 15 million years ago, when the uplift of the Andes along the Pacific coast formed a barricade, creating an inland sea that slowly became a massive freshwater lake. Other geologic shifts about 11 million years ago began to push the water eastward, eventually draining the lake and forming the river we know today. The expanse of that ancient freshwater lake is now an ecological palimpsest, a zone dominated by the world’s largest tropical rainforest, home to the richest diversity of plants and animals on Earth.