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I never would have step foot in the Amazon rainforest were it not for a failed trip to the mountains two years ago with my daughter. We went to Cusco, with the hope of making it to Machu Picchu, but instead met up with a case of soroche, or altitude sickness. Except for the World Cup match between U.S. and Italy, for which we dragged ourselves down to the city’s only English pub, we were pretty much confined to our beds. After three days and gallons of coca tea (which turns your urine brown, did you know that?), we gave up and high-tailed it back to sea level.

It was my cousin Rosa who suggested a trip to the Amazon as a way of salvaging our vacation. I was hesitant at first. For some reason, the jungle never appealed to me nearly as much as the mountains. With all the ancient ruins and adorable Quechua-speaking villagers, the mountains are a dream come true for the frustrated anthropologist and archaeologist in me.

Women of the Bora tribe, performing for tourists. Photo by Sarah Gillespie.

Yet, as I learned two years ago, and was reminded on our trip last week, the “story” of the Amazon jungle is very much a human story. As amazing and abundant the wildlife is, what fascinates me even more are the families that live along that Amazon, Napo and countless tributaries, eking out a living from the water and the forest.

Floating houses along a backwater of the Amazon. Photo by Sarah Guagliardo

There are very few roads in the South American jungle. For instance, Iquitos, a city of 500,000, is not connected to the rest of Peru by pavement. If you want to visit or escape Iquitos, you have two choices: plane or boat. Since virtually nobody can afford to fly, boats are the preferred mode of transportation, whether the destination is Lima (a few hundred kilometers upriver to Pucallpa and then 20 hours by bus) or just to the next village.

So, in essence, the rivers are the highways of the jungle. And like any road, the rivers of the Amazon basin are busy with traffic, from large, double-decker steamships (well, they’re not steam powered anymore, but have changed little in form since the days when they were!) to long, motorized canoes called peque-peque because of the sound they make as they sputter up and down the river. The humblest river craft is a dugout canoe, that even the poorest jungle dweller owns. It rides very low in the water. When laden with an entire family, it looks like it is on the verge of being swamped or capsizing. But knowing how to balance in a dugout canoe is an essential life skill that is second nature. As our guide explained, children in the jungle learn to canoe, swim and handle a machete at a very early age.

Boy playing in dugout canoe. Photo by Sarah Guagliardo

At first glance, you might think that the banks of the Amazon are solid walls of forest. But as you near the shore, you discover that the river is lined with villages, towns and farmsteads of varying sizes. One dead giveaway: clumps of shiny, broad banana leaves. presence of banana plants, which usually indicate a current or recent homestead.

The day’s catch: catfish and sugar cane. Photo by Sarah Gillespie.

Along the river, people are can be seen nearly everywhere, fishing, washing clothes, cutting wood, tending animals or simply hanging around. In bigger towns, some people live in luxurious concrete homes. But that’s an exception, as the annual flooding of the river will inundate any home that isn’t on high ground. Thus, the vast majority of homes are fairly open structures made of wood and raised up on stilts.

Girl with sloth. Photo by Sarah Gillespie.

As a parent, I can’t help but to the notice the children. They are nearly all adorable, with beautiful, dark brown skin of many shades and with different looks that hint at differences in tribal origins. Unlike the mountains, where the primary indigenous language is Quechua and most people of native origin call the Incas their ancestors, the people of the jungle come from dozens, if not hundreds of different tribes, each with their own language and customs. Except for the fact that they share a common waterway, similar foods and a country called Perú, many jungle dwellers are foreigners to each other.

A note about the photos: Sarah Gillespie and Sarah Guagliardo are two American women that we met at Heliconia Amazon Lodge. They kindly consented to let me use their photos for this post. I would have wanted have used my own, except that when reviewing my photos I noticed that I didn’t have a single usable photograph of people from the jungle. How odd, given the very premise of the post. But upon some reflection I realized that I am rather gun-shy with my camera and reluctant to thrust a camera in front of locals. Of course it’s all in how you approach it. There are polite and appropriate ways to take pictures of strangers. It’s something I’ll have to work on next time!