Restaurants & Hotels

Restaurants & Hotels

You can dine out at restaurants only in Iquitos and Puerto Maldonado, the Amazon basin's two cities. Your sole dining option is your lodge if you stay in the jungle. Meals are served family-style at fixed times with everyone seated around a big table, and you can swap stories with your fellow lodgers about what you saw on your day's excursion. The food, usually made of local ingredients, is quite tasty.

Puerto Maldonado and Iquitos have typical, albeit small, hotels—ones where, presuming availability, you can show up on a moment's notice, sign in, and secure a room. Iquitos also has a few hotels geared to business travelers. Beyond the Amazon's two cities lie the region's jungle lodges. They vary in degree of rusticity and remoteness, usually reachable only by boat. They range from camping sites a cut above the norm to full-fledged ecolodges with private baths and solar-powered lighting. Most make do without electricity, however. Showers will be refreshingly or bracingly cold, though some lodges can now heat the water.

All lodges offer some variation on a fully escorted tour, with packages from one to several nights including guided wildlife-viewing excursions. Confirm that lodge beds have mosquito nets and that all meals are included. Many lodges quote rates per person for tours that last more than one day—it's not realistic to stay for just one night. That said, the price ranges given for lodges in this chapter reflect the cost of one night's stay for two people.

Although travel agencies selling package tours via Lima or Cusco accept credit cards, most jungle lodges cannot, as they do not have electricity or phone wires. All lodges accept soles, and most accept U.S. dollars for drinks and souvenirs.