South America
South America pairs two very different kinds of river cruising. On the Amazon, small expedition-style ships push deep into the rainforest of Peru and Brazil, trading castles and cathedrals for pink dolphins, riverside villages, and some of the richest wildlife on the planet. Just off the continent's Pacific coast, the Galápagos Islands offer a different kind of adventure cruising, built around wildlife-viewing excursions to islands protected as a national park.
The two are rarely combined into a single cruise — most travelers choose one destination and add the other as a pre- or post-cruise extension — and both run on a different clock than Europe's rivers: the Amazon's high-water season (December to June) and low-water season (July to November) each offer a different kind of wildlife viewing, while the Galápagos, sitting on the equator, has no real off-season at all.
