4-Day Budget Manu National Park Tour

Our 4-Day Budget Manu tour is the most affordable way to reach genuine Amazon rainforest from Cusco. It runs the classic Manu Road — over the Andes at the Acjanaco pass, down through the cloud forest and on to the Alto Madre de Dios — and then puts you in a motorboat for the lowland leg. There are no internal flights and no luxury lodges: the price stays down because the whole trip is overland and river, staying in simple, comfortable jungle lodges. If you want Manu National Park without the cost of a full Reserved Zone expedition, this is the trip.

Both of our Manu programmes are general natural-history trips rather than dedicated birding tours: your guide is a naturalist covering birds, mammals, reptiles, plants and the forest as a whole, and the pace is set for wildlife watching rather than for working a bird list. If you want a specialist bird guide with you throughout, we can add one for an extra fee — just say so when you enquire.

Day one is a long and spectacular drive. You cross the inter-Andean valleys above Cusco, stop at the Ninamarca chullpas — pre-Inca burial towers built by the Lupaca, an Aymara people from the shores of Lake Titicaca — and walk the colonial streets and site museum of Paucartambo. The last Andean stop is the Acjanaco pass at 3,650 m, the park checkpoint where the puna tips over into the Amazon basin. From there the road drops for hours through elfin forest and cloud forest thick with orchids, bromeliads, tree ferns and lichens, Spectacled Bear country, down to the Orquídeas de San Pedro lodge at 1,400 m.

The second morning is the one birders come for: the lek of the Andean Cock-of-the-rock, Peru's national bird, where the males gather at first light to display. After breakfast the descent continues through Pilcopata — where you can take a free hour and a half of class I–II canoeing on the Koñeq and Alto Madre de Dios rivers — to the river port of Atalaya at 600 m. From there it is a motorboat run downstream, herons, cormorants and vultures working the banks, to Erika, a private reserve on the river where you spend the next two nights.

The two full days at Erika are the heart of the trip. A dawn boat takes you to a parrot clay lick on the riverbank, where Blue-headed Parrots, White-eyed Parakeets and, with luck, Chestnut-fronted Macaws come down for minerals. Later you paddle a catamaran across Machuwasi Lake for Hoatzin, Horned Screamer, Red-capped Cardinal and Capped Heron, with capybara and monkeys along the shore, and walk a forest trail to a giant Ceiba. On the last morning you run back upriver to Atalaya and stop at the Mirador Pico de Hoz hummingbird garden at 750 m before the drive home, reaching Cusco in the afternoon.