Delfin II

Delfin II is a Peruvian riverboat, not a Lindblad ship. She was built in 2009 on the riverbank at Iquitos by Lissy Urteaga and Aldo Macchiavello, who had sold everything three years earlier to buy a wooden boat and start Delfin Amazon Cruises, and who still own and run the company. Lindblad sells and staffs voyages aboard her as a partner; the vessel, the crew and most of the guides are Peruvian and stay Peruvian when the charter changes hands. That is the most important thing to understand about a week on her, and it is a point in her favor.

What twenty-eight guests on a river actually means

She is 121 feet long, thirty feet across the beam, three decks high, and she carries twenty-eight people in fourteen suites with fifteen crew looking after them. Four of those suites sit forward with windows wrapping ninety degrees around the corner, so the river arrives on two sides at once. The finish is tropical hardwood and wood floors rather than the cruise-ship palette, and she is a Relais & Châteaux member, which in this part of the world means the cooking and the service are held to a hotel standard rather than a boat one.

The number that matters is not the guest count on its own but what it does to the day. Twenty-eight people fit into a handful of skiffs in one go. Nobody waits for a second run, nobody is assigned a group letter, and when someone spots something in the canopy the boat can simply stop. On a vessel three times the size the same day becomes a rotation.

The boat is not how you see the Amazon

The riverboat is transport and hotel. The actual exploring is done from outboard skiffs and from kayaks, up side channels and flooded forest where the water is a few feet deep and the canopy closes overhead. That is why the fleet here is skiffs and not Zodiacs and why the hull draws so little: the point is to leave the main channel. Pink and gray river dolphins, macaws, several species of monkey, giant water lilies and the ceiba trees are the standard catalog, and the expedition team includes naturalists from the region who know which channel had the sloth in it last week.

Her cruising ground is Peru’s Upper Amazon in Loreto, the Marañón and the Ucayali down to the confluence where the Amazon proper begins, and the Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve, a vast tract of seasonally flooded forest between the two rivers. Visits to ribereño river communities are part of the itinerary rather than an optional call.

Where she sails

Every sailing listed here is eight nights and begins in Lima, from which guests fly on to Iquitos and join the boat upriver. She does not have a season and she does not reposition; the Upper Amazon is navigable year-round and she works it all twelve months. High water and low water change what you see rather than whether you go, at high water the skiffs get deep into the flooded forest, at low water the beaches and the birds concentrate.

Who she suits

Anyone who wants the rainforest at close range with a naturalist beside them and is happy for the vessel to be small, quiet and warm. It is a good choice for travelers who would find a lodge too static; she moves overnight, so the landscape is different every morning without anybody packing a bag.

She does not suit people who need a ship to do things. There is no pool worth the name, no entertainment, no gym, and evenings are a briefing and dinner. She is also genuinely hot and genuinely buggy, the skiff outings run at dawn and late afternoon because the middle of the day is unbearable, and anyone with limited mobility should know that getting in and out of a small boat twice a day is the entire structure of the week. Nothing about this is a polar expedition with palm trees; it is a different discipline.