RESERVA AMAZÓNICA

This fabulous lodge is the most luxurious, and most romantic, in the Peruvian Amazon. It was founded in 1975 and, along with the Explorer’s Inn, is the oldest lodge in the area. It is yet another production from José and Denise Koechlin, Peru’s ecopioneers who also own the elegant Machu Picchu Pueblo Hotel.

Near the riverbank, a sophisticated round dining building sets the tone for this lodge. This is not the kind of place where guests sit around in mud-spattered rubbers. After long walks or boat rides, guests take hot showers, get cleaned up, and take cocktails in the dining loft with hip lounge music. The elegant dinner buffet, served downstairs, features organic salads and gourmet jungle entréea like paca, which is doncella fish, tomatoes, and onions cooked inside a bamboo tube over an open fire. There are 41 private wooden bungalows, including three luxury suites, with wood porches and hammocks, beds with mosquito netting, hot showers, kerosene lamps, and interesting touches like wooden sinks and the hotel’s own line of organic shampoo and conditioner.

The lodge has several unique attractions. First, it is surrounded by 200 hectares of private lands plus an endless 10,000-hectare reserve. A 500-meter hanging canopy walk is in the works, and an island in front of the lodge has been converted into a refuge for rescued monkeys—including brown capuchin, squirrel, and the tiny, nectar-eating saddleback tamarin. There are long hikes to different habitats, canoe trips up the nearby Río Gamitana, an eco-center with a glass box for viewing the inside of a leaf cutter ant colony, and a butterfly cage. A number of animals have been rescued from various predicaments and now live on the property, including a Cuvier’s toucan, razor-billed curassau, pale-winged trumpeter, and scarlet macaw. Even a tapir pops in once in a while (in Lima tel. 01/610-0404 or in the U.S. 800/442-5042, central@inkaterra.com, www.inkaterra.com, $157 for two nights).

Just downstream from the lodge, InkaTerra has launched Fundo Concepción, an environmental research and education center run jointly with the U.S.-based ACER. The main building is the restored home of Dr. Arturo Gonzáles del Rio, a beloved local doctor who bought a steamship from the Bolivia Navy in the 1930s and used it as an ambulance for local native people. The rusty girders and boilers of the boat can be seen during the walk into the center, which also has the area’s largest garden of medicinal plants.