You can kayak in this Amazonian rainforest once a year—here's how

Beyond the bow of my kayak, the world has turned upside down. Half-submerged tree trunks meet their reflections and branch into twin canopies. Clouds floating above are mirrored below, shading our passage and splitting in our wake. I drop a hand in the water and let it trail beside me, knuckle-deep in sky.

“Sometimes, the river acts like a mirror,” says Rafael Ferraz from his kayak, speaking with a singsong lilt. He’s a nature guide at Cristalino Lodge, a wilderness reserve set on the Cristalino River, which flows for 70 miles through the southern Amazon basin in mid-western Brazil. It’s a blackwater river, with a characteristic slow current and inky shade caused by leaching from fallen leaves. On a windless day like this, with nothing but our paddles to ripple the surface, the reflections are so still and clear you may well feel suspended, caught between two realities.

The impression is uncanny during the green season, from December to June, when the water rises and spills out onto the shores. “It takes up to four months to overflow, and it only stays high for a month or so,” says Rafael. “In that window, it can reach over 10 feet above ground and some 300 feet into the jungle.” These areas are what Brazilians call igapó, a word from the Old Tupi Indigenous language to describe seasonally blackwater-flooded forests.

We entered one from the Cristalino’s main channel, through a gap in the riverbank’s near-impenetrable vegetation. And now, we’re kayaking over the forest floor, charting a course between trunks that rise straight from the water. A family of white-cheeked spider monkeys — small, black, with giveaway tufts framing their faces — swing from arm to arm through the canopy, using their prehensile tails as a fifth limb. They’re endemic to the Cristalino region, having perfectly adapted to life in its branches.

Their habitat is threatened by what environmentalists have dubbed the ‘Arc of Deforestation’, a growing belt of plantations and cattle ranches in the south of the Brazilian Amazon. Over the past 50 years, it’s claimed around 30% of primary forest. This pocket has remained untouched thanks to local efforts: Cristalino Lodge was founded to support the Cristalino Private National Heritage Reserve, 44sq miles of protected land, and Cristalino Ecological Foundation, which conducts research and engages with communities on the importance of conservation.

The lodge was designed to showcase the life it helps preserve. Guests might spot capuchin monkeys around the open-air restaurant, or a brocket deer outside their wood-and-glass bungalow. Walk the grounds at night and you might spy tapirs by a clay lick. Head on day hikes, and you’ll see the rainforest in its primordial glory — roots like a ballerina’s tutu, bark that’s grown spikes, vines tied into impossible knots, defying gravity and reason.

The area is especially popular with birdwatchers, home to around 600 catalogued species, about 50% of all avian life in the Amazon. The next morning at 5am, Rafael and I set off for a 165ft watchtower and find it lit by indigo twilight, the canopy cloaked by a blanket of fog. Evaporation from the Cristalino River and perspiration from the trees condense here, Rafael explains; next, it’ll go west, heating the Andes, then return to Brazil, bringing humidity. “We call it ‘flying river’,” he says. “This will probably be rain in Rio in a couple of weeks.”

We watch the sun rise over primary forest sweeping as far as the eye can see — a new morning that feels like the first on Earth. We listen to the call of howler monkeys, like a gust of wind funnelled through a tunnel. We follow the flight of golden-winged parakeets and, using a spotting scope, take in the black ringlets of a curl-crested aracari. “This ‘woo-woo’? Ringed woodpecker,” says Rafael, untangling the soundscape. “That dog-like bark? White-throated toucan. And that loud ‘pee-haw’ — screaming pihas, the sentinels of the rainforest.”

Through all this, the ‘flying river’ spills in and out of itself, flooding and surrounding us with fog, channelling its course and flowing on like a stream of mist. The phenomenon happens year-round, Rafael tells me, but the green season is the best time to see it. “This is what I think of when I think of the Amazon,” he says, face blushed by a warming dawn. It’s what will linger in my mind’s eye, too — a place where the coming of rain washes clean the world as you know it, pouring the sky into the river, splashing the river in the sky. All that’s left is space for wonder, and a new day to inspire it.