You know you have arrived at the Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve when you hear the jungle before you see it. Near the end of your hour-long speedboat journey from the tiny town of Tefé, in northwestern Brazil, you can already hear the shrieks of the timid red-faced white uakari monkey, the wheezing of the curious spiky-haired hoatzin, and the splash of the legendary pirarucu. It is not surprising. After all, you have just glided into the largest protected area of flooded forest in the Amazon, which every year drowns entire trees with its ten- to 12-meter swell in water, its 1,124,000 hectares offering some of the best seats in the Amazon for most astonishing wildlife and nature viewing.  

And before long, it’s curtains on this spectacle, as the pirarucu, a.k.a. the Moby Dick of the Amazon, and the pink river dolphin bob up from the tea-colored river for air; the hyper howler, capuchin and black squirrel monkeys play in the treetops; the toucan, harpy eagle, hoatzin and macaw circle the blue skies; and the black caiman—once endangered but now thriving at Mamirauá, which boasts its largest population in the Amazon—basks in the sunlight at the water’s edge.

Yet clearly MIA is the elusive white uakari monkey, which only lives here, and for whose protection the Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve was created in the first place in 1996.  

But Mamirauá’s claim to fame stretches beyond its abundant wildlife and beautiful scenery—it also has dibs on being the first sustainable development reserve in Brazil. And the reserve doesn’t just sit on its laurels: It actively protects its rainforest and denizens, enlisting the locals to help find solutions for harvesting the natural resources on which they depend in an environmentally sensitive and sustainable way. Which they ingeniously do—such as cutting down only certain trees for wood and setting fishing quotas for the endangered pirarucu—and then most proudly showcase it when camera-toting curious tourists come trekking through, paying good money to experience an authentic Amazon adventure.

Many of the locals participate in this eco-tourism program—the income of which is reinvested in the conservation project—acting as kitchen staff and guides. And as guides, they will tell you that howler monkeys will wake you up at sunrise (and sometimes earlier) and that a dip in the inky river might have you doing laps around caimans, but there’s one thing they cannot ensure: that you will see the elusive white uakari monkey…