Amazonas

Here the Guide changes scale: the department of Amazonas is bigger than many European countries and has one road, which dies at kilometer twenty. Everything else is river — a breathing brown sea that rises and falls ten meters between seasons — and standing forest, the oldest pharmacy and library on the planet.

The sensible traveller lands in Leticia, greets three countries from the riverfront — Brazil and Peru are a street or a boat away — and heads upriver: to Puerto Nariño, the town without cars where people think quietly; to look for pink dolphins in lake Tarapoto; and to sleep at least one night deep in the forest, where the darkness has a soundtrack.

The non-negotiable honesty: you don't enter the jungle alone but with a local guide — that is safety and it is justice, because the knowledge is theirs —; high water and low water are two different journeys and neither is the wrong one; and the dolphins are watched from a distance: no hands, no food, no promises.