Tefé

Getting to Tefé requires a decision: eight hours by boat from Manaus on the Solimões River, or forty-five minutes on a regional flight that operates on an optimistic schedule and is frequently affected by weather, river fog, and what the airline staff describe as “operational adjustments.” I took the boat on the way out and the plane on the way back, which gave me two entirely different relationships with the same stretch of river. The boat arrives in the dark, gliding into the floating port as the town’s few electric lights reflect in the water. Nobody meets you. You drag your bag up the metal gangway and stand in a warm, very quiet street, wondering which way to walk.

Tefé is a city of sixty thousand people that feels genuinely isolated — not in the romantic, curated way of some Amazon towns marketed to tourists, but in the functional sense of a place whose logistics are determined by the river and the flight schedule. It sits on the south bank of the Solimões between Manaus and Tabatinga, connected to both by water and by a single daily flight, and it exists primarily as a service center for the surrounding communities and the researchers at the Mamirauá Institute. The town’s streets are painted concrete and dust, and the market sells the usual river produce plus dried piranha packed in plastic bags for sale upriver, where the fish is less abundant.

The Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve, which begins a few kilometres from Tefé on the far shore of the lake, is one of the most important protected areas in Amazonia — and one of the least-visited by international tourists, which gives it a quality of authenticity that more famous parts of the basin have lost. The reserve covers forty-three hundred square kilometres of várzea, the seasonally flooded forest that flanks the Solimões, and during the flood season — roughly November to June — the entire forest floor is submerged beneath several metres of water. Navigation is by dugout canoe through the canopy. You paddle past the tops of trees that are rooted fifteen metres below the surface, with Amazonian manatees and river dolphins moving through the drowned forest beneath you and monkeys traveling through the higher branches overhead.

I went in February, when the water was near its peak. The local guide, a man from the riverside community who had been trained by the Mamirauá Institute’s research program, brought the canoe to what he described as a famous local tree — a cecropia that rose about four metres above the waterline and was, therefore, about ten metres above its normal ground level. A three-toed sloth hung from one of the lower branches. I had been in the Amazon for two weeks by this point and had not yet seen a sloth, and the anticlimax of how unremarkable it appeared — hanging there in the middle of an extraordinary flooded forest, looking like it had somewhere to be and had decided against going — made me laugh out loud for the first time in days.

The uakari monkey is the creature Mamirauá is most known for — the white bald uakari, which looks like no other primate on earth, its bright red face and ghostly white fur visible in the canopy from remarkable distances. I saw a group of seven on the third morning, moving through the treetops with a speed that my camera couldn’t quite track. The guide said they were moving because they heard a harpy eagle calling somewhere to the north. We listened. The call came again — distant, descending — and the uakaris moved faster, red faces disappearing into the upper canopy, and then the forest was quiet again in the way that the forest is never actually quiet.

When to go: The reserve operates two distinct tourism seasons. Flood season (November to June) is for canoe travel through the flooded forest, manatee sightings, and the uakari colony — the water level peaks in March and April. Low water season (July to October) exposes the forest floor, allows walking trails, and brings more river beaches. The Mamirauá Institute lodge must be booked well in advance; independent access without the institute’s program is not practical. Budget at least three nights to justify the logistics of getting here.