Ariau Amazon towers Hotel

Associated Press

Family Explores the Amazonas Rain Forest

by Rick Sammon

MANAUS, Brazil (AP) - From our hotel, it was just a 20-minute ride by motorized longboat to the thatched huts of the Tarino Indian village deep in the Amazonas rain forest, but it seemed as if we had been transported back in time to another millennium. Listen to the tribal chief, through an interpreter, explaining some Tarino customs: "We paint our faces and bodies so the spirits of the rain forest can recognize us, and therefore protect us," he says. "This is especially important when we are hunting...

Forbes FYI Travel Supplement

Brazil's 205-room AriaÚ Hotel may be the world's only accommodations set amid the wild flowers, birds and monkeys of the rain-forest canopy.

The way to Tarzan's house was a wooden catwalk 60 feet high that angled through the jungle canopy, with trees growing through the floorboards and lianas draping themselves all around. Well-camouflauged crocodilians hunted in the flooded forest below, and a procession of brilliantly colored parrots was arriving for their dinner-at the hotel's expense, of course. I passed a menagerie of friendly monkeys, one of whom jumped on my back and began grooming my hair while another tried to relieve me...