At the turn of 2015, when I was between endings and beginnings, I felt an urge to look out onto the world once more—its immensity, its unknowability—to find a way of seeing it anew. In search of that tiny shift in mind and heart that is capable of changing one’s life, I had travelled to Peru, and thought to end my trip with a five-day journey by dugout canoe through the Amazon jungle in the north. I had met a group of travellers headed the same way with the same idea, and thought I would join them.

Then, I saw the map of the river. It covered one wall of a small travel agency's office in sleepy Lagunas—the gateway village to the Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve—and five days would take me barely halfway up it. Instead, I followed the bright blue rivulet right to the edge of the ceiling, where it pooled into a lake: Cocha Pasto. “It’s pure wilderness there,” Miguel said, with a whispery reverence that made an impression on me. But it was at least a ten-day trip, which was exactly how many days I had before my flight home. I decided that’s where I would go, though it meant forgoing the group’s company. I wanted the unknown, an old-fashioned adventure; I wanted to feel awe. Later, I learned that I was only the eighth person that year to make the same journey.

I say it now like I had made the decision just like that. But I agonised over it. I had seen enough movies to imagine the Amazon’s possible horrors, and the fact that there would be zero means of communication after the third day weighed on my mind—even as I texted my human ports-of-call and told them not to worry unless they didn’t hear from me by the eleventh day. Still, Miguel had talked about Cocha Pasto in terms eminently doable, with a safe return seemingly taken for granted. I dared myself to go ahead, but, erring on the side of caution, asked if he knew a female guide—and was surprised when he said yes. The next morning, I found out that he had simply asked the guide to bring his wife. "Two for the price of one," Miguel said cheerfully. You can imagine how it looked: like I was being chaperoned. With some hilarity, I thought, That’s not the kind of traveler I want to appear to be! And yet, as a woman traveling alone, you feel obligated to take all the precautions you can.

In the end, I couldn’t imagine those ten days without my guides, Santiago and Maritza. The way he teased her about her less-than-stellar fishing skills, and the way she giggled back—it was like they were still the teenage sweethearts they had once been. And despite the ordeal that it sometimes was—the eighty or so mosquito bites I counted all over my body (it’s an approximate number; I did actually count them), the flooded cabanas (it was the rainy season; we had to sleep on a roof beam once), the way we had to relieve ourselves just by backing our butts out the stern of the canoe (the jungle was flooded; often there was no land in sight to perch on), and the fact that we never made it to Cocha Pasto (the timing of the rains stymied our way in; I had limited time)—it’s a journey that, four years later, I still think about.

I think about how—clichéd as it sounds—it’s the journey, not the destination, that matters. How the colour of the river changed from tea brown to polished black as we paddled deeper into the jungle, reflecting perfectly the world above. How atmospheric it was to be on the river under rain and lighting, wending our way in the dark with just Santiago's head torch to guide us. How the “kutu-kutu” (that’s what Santiago called it), with their stubborn water roots, blanketed the river for miles, so that it looked like we had been transplanted to some kind of surreal golf course. And I think about the many portentous stories Santiago told of the dangerous beasts we thought we heard but ultimately never saw: a reminder that for a sojourner in the jungle, at least, your imagination might be the wildest thing there is.

For a sojourner, too, a self-imposed aloneness lets you enter strange worlds more fully, and lets you check out when you want to. Nelson, a ranger we met who spent forty days out in the jungle at a time in complete isolation, didn't have that choice, and I will always remember him for his chipped front tooth—a memento, he said, from when he had woken up one night shuddering from a bad dream and found himself gnawing on his rifle's barrel. As we chugged away from his lonely outpost one morning after spending the night, he made a mock sadface and said, “I’m going to cry when you all leave.” But I sensed a welling sincerity, and imagined he might have done just that when we rounded the bend, out of sight.