Tuesday was a very long day with very little “fun”. TL;DR – we traveled 13 hours from when we left the boat until we got to our room in the Sacred Valley:

• It takes two flights Iquitos -> Lima -> Cusco.
• There’s a lot of driving – from the boat to the airport, and then from the airport to our hotel.

The Aqua Nera offered a 6:00am skiff outing (2). It was just a ride across the river to Nauta to visit a local craft market. We decided to skip this and get a bit more sleep.

So we got up at 6:00, finished packing, put out the bags, and went for breakfast about 7:30. At 9:00, we collected our hand baggage and went to the skiffs to transfer across the river to where vans were waiting.

Since Iquitos airport is 2-1/2 hours from where we disembarked in Nauta, we killed an hour and broke up the trip by stopping for an hour at an animal rescue center along the way. The boat crew kept calling it a Manatee Rescue Center, but it also rescued other rain forest animals: parrots and macaws, caymans, turtles, etc. While it’s a worthwhile cause, it really just filled the hour and gave the Aqua Nera a chance to say they had another activity on your three day cruise. It was pretty forgettable.

Overall, the day was uneventful but exhausting. Dinner was MacD’s at Lima Airport. We arrived at our hotel around 9:30, and went directly to our room to get settled enough to get up the next day for our morning tour of the Sacred Valley.

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(1) We probably sailed somewhere between 60 and 100 miles in total, branching off of the Amazon itself to huge tributary. I have no real idea where the boat stopped, or where we went in the skiffs, as they were not permanent towns.

(2) There’s a bit of misleading information about the ship’s activities. They advertise two skiff rides per day, so we would get six on our three night cruise. The implication is a morning and afternoon ride every day. But you don’t board until 4:00pm, and there’s no activity that afternoon. The second day, there’s a one hour ride at 6:00am, a three hour ride at 10:00am, and a second three hour ride at 4:00pm. (Sunrise and sunset are at 6am and 6pm). The third day had a three hour morning and a three hour afternoon ride. And on the final day, just a 6:00am one hour outing, a five minute ride across the river to a craft market.