I am the first to write a review about this WHS - no wonder since it sees only ca. 2500 visitors a year. The Reserved Zone of Manu National Park can be reached from Cuzco with a couple of tour companies. I went there on a 5-day tour with the well-organized and recommended Pantiacolla Tours. It is possible to fly in and out (there´s a tiny grass airstrip at the Yuni Lodge), but I choose to drive down from Cuzco for 1.5 days through the cloud forest until the port of Atalaya at the Madre de Dios River. This way you´ll see the landscape change dramatically, and there are already plenty of birds to see along the road including the Andean cock-of-the-rock and the quetzal.

The tour company had put "binoculars" at the no. 1 spot of the packing list. And indeed they proved to be essential, as the wildlife here is not easy to see with the naked eye. The rainforest is very thick, and many of the species have disguising colours.

We navigated the Manu River for hours, always being the only ones on the river. Both white and black caiman are a common sight here, lying around at the river's characteristic beaches. We saw one black caiman about 4 meters long. Also, we happened upon two tapirs scrambling upon the river bank. Tapir is a rare sighting, even scarcer than the jaguar. Unfortunately, we missed out on the latter one during this trip.

On short hikes through the forest, it was easy to spot monkeys. They live high in the treetops, but are noisy and sometimes show off. We saw brown capuchins, squirrel monkeys, the very elastic spider monkeys (a joy to stare at), and the impressively strong woolly monkeys. And in the jungle camp, we were awoken each morning at 5 a.m. by the throat singing of the howler monkeys. We did get a good look at them too.

The Manu River has created a number of oxbow lakes. Lake Salvador and Lake Otorongo are the most notable ones. We visited Lake Salvador two times, once in the late afternoon and once in the early morning. The word "pristine" could have been invented just to describe this precious lake. The thing to do here is looking for Giant Otter. The first day we were not lucky: they had moved away from the spot where the guide knew they lived. But on the second morning, we saw three adults at their breakfast. One had caught a very large fish, almost half his own size. He was loudly eating it. A really fun thing to watch. They are called Giant Otters as they can get 2 meters tall (including their tail), but they did not look that big to me. Birds we saw at the lake include the punky hoatzin and the wonderful green ibis. Groups can watch and look for the animals at this lake by using a wooden catamaran.

We were less lucky at Lake Otorongo, where there is only a viewing platform.

What I will most remember about this trip though is the enormous variety of trees and plants. I got bored by forests in Australia, but Manu NP is really extraordinary in its variety. It is fully packed with green leaves in all different sizes, shapes and colour shades.