Amazon River

Capybara
Weighing up to 150 pounds, the capybara is the world's largest rodent. It has a wide distribution across South America, but the animal especially likes the warm, humid environs of the Amazon River basin. The capybara subsists on the rain forest's copious vegetation, including fruit, tree bark, and aquatic plants, and has been known to congregate in herds of up to 100 members. The rain forest may be endangered, but the capybara isn't; this rodent continues to thrive, despite the fact that it's a popular menu item in some South American villages.

After starting its seemingly slow and subtle voyage in the highlands of Peru, the Amazon River traverses through Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela before entering Brazil and flowing out of its Atlantic coast. However, its tributaries also flood the Amazon basin in Bolivia in the south, home to the Madidi National Park (one of the Amazon’s largest protected reserves) as well as Suriname, Guyana and French Guiana. Given each country’s distinctive tourist infrastructure, some spots are simply better and more rewarding to visit than others, depending on whether you’re after a land-based Amazon tour or Amazon River cruise. The most established visiting hot-spots are in Peru (Iquitos and Puerto Maldonado), Ecuador (Coca), Brazil (Manaus) and Bolivia (Rurrenabaque).

Believe it or not, there’s been wide speculation over the real ‘source’ of the Amazon River for decades with researchers at constant odds over findings. The most widely believed theory is that the Amazon River flow originates in the high Andean mountains of Peru, namely the three rivers of Mantaro (the furthest upstream source), Apurimac (the most distant uninterrupted source) and Maranon (the main source by volume). The Maranon River flows upstream of Iquitos, Peru’s Amazon adventure capital and one of the most spellbinding places to enjoy Amazon River adventures.

A pair of pink Amazon river dolphins emerges for just a moment, arcing above the chocolate brown waters inside the Mamirauá Institute for Sustainable Development, a research facility at the tropical heart of the Brazilian Amazon. Powerful jets of water spray out of their blowholes as these freshwater mammals take in air before submerging.

Moments later the duo reappear on the other side of the Japurá River, playfully dovetailing, and skirting the edge of the várzea rainforest — a seasonal floodplain where, in this part of Amazonia, river levels can rise and fall by up to 12 meters (39 feet) a year, at times opening up vast swathes of rainforest to these graceful swimmers.

"They are very special creatures," says Natanael dos Santos, a guide working at the Mamirauá Institute. "They are extremely intelligent and can display a complex set of behaviors, even like humans." These skilled, sharp-toothed hunters, often reaching more than eight feet in length, are well adapted to shifting river levels. During highwater periods they pe*****te deep into the rainforest using echolocation to search murky pools amid submerged tree roots for prey including dozens of fish species, turtles and freshwater crabs

How Big are Anaconda Snakes?
Many legends and lore circulate around the length of the Giant Anaconda. The Green Anaconda, or Eunectes murinus, is the heaviest, largest, and longest snake in South America. The Python still takes the title of the world’s longest snake, but in terms of diameter and weight, the anaconda is not only the largest in South America and the Amazon rainforest but also the world. The heaviest and longest anaconda ever recorded weighed a whopping 500 lbs (227 kilograms) and measured a monster 27.7 feet (8.43 meters) in length, with diameter of 44 inches (1.11 meters)!

During the days of President Teddy Roosevelt, the Wildlife Conservation Society offered a $50,000 reward to anyone who could deliver a live snake measuring over 30 feet in length. The offer was thankfully terminated in 2002 to discourage people from disturbing these animals from their natural habitats. A shame for the Brazilian construction workers who supposedly encountered a 33-foot anaconda in 2016 in a cave in Brazil’s northern state of Para, although this was never officially recorded or verified.

The total length of the river—as measured from the headwaters of the Ucayali-Apurímac river system in southern Peru—is at least 4,000 miles (6,400 km), which makes it slightly shorter than the Nile River but still the equivalent of the distance from New York City to Rome.
Its westernmost source is high in the Andes Mountains, within 100 miles (160 km) of the Pacific Ocean, and its mouth is in the Atlantic Ocean, on the northeastern coast of Brazil. However, both the length of the Amazon and its ultimate source have been subjects of debate since the mid-20th century, and there are those who claim that the Amazon is actually longer than the Nile. (See below The length of the Amazon.)