The Traveling Doctors Of The Amazon (PHOTOS)

Deep in the Amazon jungle, upriver of the town of Iquitos, Peru, a team of visiting and local doctors steam up the Amazon and its tributaries on the riverboat Nenita.
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Deep in the Amazon jungle, upriver of the town of Iquitos, Peru, a team of visiting and local doctors steam up the Amazon and its tributaries on the riverboat Nenita. For weeks on end, as part of Project Amazonas, they provide essential medical services to the remote villages, where locals live in thatched-roof malokas. In these villages, which are sometimes weeks away from the regional hospital in Iquitos, Peru, medical care and health education only come by boat.

Olivier Drouin, a doctor from Montreal, is one of the doctors aboard The Nenita and Where Travel documented his journey into the jungle. His trip, which you might call voluntourism, offers him the opportunity to swat mosquitoes aboard a barge-like boat, in concert with Peruvian colleagues. Without CT scanners or laser-guided surgical tools, the teams practice what they like to call "real medicine."

It's this world of dugout canoes and annual floods where modern medical practices are colliding with village traditions.

--Geoff Kohl, WhereTraveler.com

The Nenita on the Yaguasyacu River

Traveling Doctors of the Amazon

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