Delfin III

Delfin III is the third and largest boat built by Delfin Amazon Cruises, the family company founded in Iquitos by Lissy Urteaga and Aldo Macchiavello. She joined the fleet in 2016, built like her predecessors in the Iquitos docks by local craftsmen, and she exists for a straightforward reason: the two smaller Delfins could not take a group. Lindblad is a partner here, not the owner. The hull, the company and nearly all the crew are Peruvian.

The difference between her and Delfin II

Sixty-three feet of extra length and fourteen more guests, and it changes the character more than the numbers suggest. Delfin II carries twenty-eight people in fourteen suites; Delfin III carries forty-two in twenty-one, across four categories that actually differ from one another. The owner’s suite runs about six hundred square feet at the bow with windows wrapping 180 degrees around it, a room with a river view on three sides, which is not a thing the smaller boat can offer. Two corner suites take the ninety-degree windows, and the rest are upper and standard suites of a bit over two hundred square feet, all of them with floor-to-ceiling glass.

The staffing is the surprise. She carries thirty crew for forty-two guests, where her smaller sister runs fifteen for twenty-eight, a better ratio on the bigger boat, not a worse one. Most of them come from the river communities the itinerary calls at, and the fittings and textiles are made by Amazonian artisans rather than bought in.

The cost of the extra size is the obvious one. Forty-two people do not fit into one round of skiffs the way twenty-eight do, so the day runs in two groups more often, and a boat of 184 feet has fewer side channels open to it than a boat of 121. If the point of the trip is to be as few people as possible in as narrow a creek as possible, the smaller boat is the better instrument.

What the week is

The exploring happens off the boat, in outboard skiffs and kayaks, up tributaries of the Marañón and the Ucayali above their confluence and into the Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve. The riverboat is the hotel and the overnight transport; the naturalists and the skiff drivers are the product. Birds, monkeys, pink and gray river dolphins, flooded-forest walks at high water and sandbars at low, and scheduled visits to ribereño communities.

The Amazon does not have a season the way a polar region does. She works these rivers all year, and the water level rather than the calendar decides what a given week looks like.

Where she sails

Everything on offer here starts in Lima, guests fly across the Andes to Iquitos and board upriver, and runs five to nine nights, most commonly eight. The short sailings are the Upper Amazon on its own; the longer ones are the same river week bolted onto Machu Picchu and the Sacred Valley, which is how most first-time visitors to Peru end up aboard.

Who she suits

Families and small groups traveling together, and anyone who wants a proper suite rather than a cabin. She is the more comfortable of the two Delfins and the only one where the accommodation itself is a reason to choose her.

She does not suit anyone who came for solitude. She is still a very small vessel by any normal measure, but she is fifty percent larger than her sister and you will notice it at the skiff landing. And she is the same trip in every other respect: hot, humid, insect-heavy, structured around two outings a day in an open boat, dark by ten, and with nothing aboard to do if the rainforest is not the reason you came.