Uruguay and the Amazon

In 2024, we felt very clever when we booked our first trip of 2026, a cruise to the Amazon River. We were planned out for our next four trips! We’ve previously been to the Amazon headwaters in Peru, travelling by dugout canoe, and thought that a luxurious cruise with friends to see the Brazilian Amazon from the deck of an Oceania cruise ship would be a nice way to return to the rainforest. Life has a way of catching one by surprise though, and plans have changed!

We are still planning to visit the Brazilian Amazon, but we are now planning to go on an expedition ship about 1/10 the size of the Oceania vessel that we had booked. And we are adding some other stops in South America; definitely Montevideo, Uruguay and a return to Iguazu Falls in Brazil and Argentina, but perhaps with some other places added too.

What is the attraction of the Amazon? It is debatably the longest river on earth, but definitely the largest volume river in the world. According to Wikipedia, the Amazon carries more water than the next seven largest river systems combined and is responsible for about 20% of the Earth’s fresh water entering the ocean. But more importantly, the Amazon basin is famously “the lungs of the earth” and has more species than any other ecosystem on earth. We’re looking forward to spending a week seeing a tiny fraction of the enormous 7,000,000 km² drainage basin of this mighty river.

Watch for more details about this trip in the coming months.

See our posts for this trip: