On a flight heading west from the city of Belém, at the Amazon river’s gaping mouth, to the inland town of Santarém, I peered through the window at a landscape that from one horizon to the other was relentlessly, monotonously, exhilaratingly green. Covering it all was a filigree of creeks and inlets: tributaries of the two mighty rivers whose confluence I could see below me, glistening silver in the afternoon sun.

On a slow Sunday, Santarém broiled in a stultifying tropical heat. Down at the harbour, among big-bellied riverboats with white-painted balconies like Mississippi steamers, stood the craft that would be my home during a five-day journey around and about the convergence of the Amazon and Tapajós rivers. The Tupaiú, one of three vessels belonging to the Amazon cruise company Kaiara, is a wooden-hulled yacht built in Manaus in 1987, sleeping a maximum of eight, whose wood-panelled cabins and simple comforts lend her an antique charm.  

Among my half-dozen fellow passengers was Martin Frankenberg, a Cambridge-educated Brazilian who for many years was a partner in luxury travel firm Matueté before launching Kaiara in November 2022. At an informal briefing in the Tupaiú’s open-sided dining area Frankenberg told us he’d first come to the region 20 years earlier, on a visit to a remote community in Acre state where his father-in-law had worked as a rubber-tapper. It was seeing the clouds of wildfire smoke over the city of S?o Paulo in 2018, however, that pushed him towards a new involvement with Amazon conservation and social welfare. Kaiara duly has a strong philanthropic dimension, working with riverside communities to offer guests experiences cultural, botanical and gastronomical.