Why I Can’t Stop Thinking About The Amazon Rainforest
Some places live in our imagination long before we arrive.
The quiet, grey skies of the British summer day are the perfect backdrop for one of my favourite hobbies - escaping to the Amazon. I’ve spent countless hours planning trips, but no destination captures my imagination quite like the Amazon. I find myself disappearing down rabbit holes looking for jungle expeditions, indigenous communities and animals I can barely believe exist.
I consider myself well travelled, yet the Amazon always feels like a journey for a different time. Part of me worries that I’ve built it up so much in my imagination that no real place could possibly live up to it.
It has been my lifelong dream to visit, and as I sit daydreaming, I feel a rush of excitement.
The strange thing is that, despite having never been, I feel as though I already know it. How can a place I’ve never visited feel so familiar? It’s a slight obsession of mine. My YouTube recommendations are filled with Amazon expeditions, jungle survival stories and documentaries about indigenous communities.
I’m not sure if you believe in past lives, but I swear that I once lived there as a “Mowgli-style child” though that’s a story for another day when I don’t mind if you think I’m totally bonkers!
It fascinates me to think there are still places on Earth that feel genuinely mysterious. Places where indigenous communities maintain a relationship with the land that feels profoundly different from the one most of us experience in the modern world. Perhaps the secret is that their existence is entirely separate from our fast-paced lives. There is something humbling about the fact that this way of living exists beyond our own experience. It feels like one of the last true mysteries left in the world.
Don’t get me started on the other types of life hidden in the jungle. The jaguars that are there, yet remain almost impossible to see. The glass frogs, which given how cute they are, I’m not entirely convinced are real. Then there’s the ghost dogs, only confirmed to exist in recent years - how crazy! The Amazon seems to be that rare place where wonder still outweighs certainty and every time I learn something new about it, I’m reminded how much in this world remains undiscovered.
The thought of standing beneath a canopy so dense that only the occasional sliver of light reaches the forest floor fills me with excitement. As evening falls and the jungle disappears into darkness, I imagine a world that feels entirely separate from my own. Getting lost in a place so unknown to me feels like the ultimate adventure.
To prepare for the day I finally set foot there, I have been looking into the work of Paul Rosolie. He speaks about the Amazon, not as a destination, but as a living, breathing entity, sharing the reality of how brutal the wild can be. His encounters with predators remind me that true adventure requires you to surrender to your surroundings. When he mentions his experiences such as the weight of an approaching storm, you realise that by submerging himself so deeply into the land, he isn’t simply observing the ecosystem, he has become part of it.
He didn’t just explore the Amazon; he studied it until he knew its heartbeat.
I cannot mention stories about exploring the Amazon without balancing them with Nemonte Nenquimo’s incredible book, We Will Not Be Saved. It is an incredible account of Nenquimo’s life growing up as a small child within her community. She strips away the romanticised ideas of the jungle and presents a raw perspective on indigenous life.
What stayed with me most was her unwavering connection to her homeland and her determination to protect it, not as an abstract cause, but as something woven into her identity. Her story of resilience is so gripping that I can’t help but feel a connection to her.
These two encounters, one a devotion to the wild, the other a testament to the resilience of a life born within it, provide a fuller, more complex picture of the rapidly changing world of the Amazon.
Perhaps that is why the Amazon continues to occupy so much space in my imagination. It reminds me that there are still corners of the world capable of surprising us. Places that resist complete understanding and invite us to remain curious.
This story is one pin on a much larger map. With every newsletter, the Private Atlas within In the OSI, creating a living collection of places, traditions, ideas and discoveries that have captured my curiosity. Together, these entries are creating a map of the world’s hidden corners. Read more about what’s inside the Private Atlas.
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It feels crazy to me that tribes there live a completely different life, isolated and disconnected from all modern world. Really makes you wonder about the concept of “normality”