The Amazon rainforest is HUGE, sprawling a whopping 3.7 million square kilometers across nine countries. As you can imagine, there’s also seemingly countless Amazon lodges for visitors to enjoy this special corner of the planet, which can make it challenging to narrow down where to stay here.
After doing a TON of research, my husband, Justin, and I choose to pay out of our own pockets and stay at the Cuyabeno Dolphin Lodge in Ecuador, thanks to its unique wildlife, all-inclusive experience, and affordable pricepoint. So if you’re considering exploring the Amazon rainforest here as well, here is our honest and unbiased Cuyabeno Dolphin Lodge review.
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Pssst… want to see more content about Ecuador? Be sure to check out:
- National Geographic-Lindblad Expeditions Galapagos Cruise Review
- The Ultimate Galapagos Packing List
Overview of staying in Cuyabeno Dolphin Lodge
If you want the TLDR on our review of the Cuyabeno Dolphin Lodge, here goes.
The Cuyabeno Dolphin Lodge is, by no means, luxurious, but it is extremely comfortable and clean. The buildings are more on the rustic side—don’t expect air conditioning or super consistent hot showers here—but there’s more than enough to offer you a cozy place to rest and relax between your Amazonian adventures.
For example, each guest gets a private room with a surprisingly comfortable bed, surrounded by mosquito netting, and a private bathroom, with a sink, shower (with sometimes hot water), and toilet. You get three delicious meals a day cooked out of local ingredients, with HUGE portions and options that are accommodating to various dietary preferences. And there’s even small luxuries that you can pay a bit extra for, like Wifi or a glass of wine or beer with dinner.
In my opinion, though, you’re not there for the food or accommodations—you’re there for the experience of being in and exploring the Amazon jungle.
And that aspect is INCREDIBLE. We opted to do the three night, four day tour and were offered a huge range of experiences throughout our stay—visiting a remote Amazonian community, canoeing while looking for wildlife, swimming in a flooded lagoon while watching the sunset, learning how to make chocolate from local cacao… I could seriously go on and on!
Our guides were friendly, knowledgeable, and spoke good English and kept us engaged throughout the experience by offering us various plants (and sometimes even insects) to taste or other kinds of interactive experiences, like climbing vines Tarzan-style or knocking on a tree root to see how the Indigenous people used to communicate here.
All in all, the Cuyabeno Dolphin Lodge offers a LOT of bang-for-your-buck and was one of the highlights of our stay in South America—just don’t expect anything super luxurious!
Wanna learn more about the experience before taking the plunge? Let’s get into it!
The location of Cuyabeno Dolphin Lodge
Cuyabeno Dolphin Lodge is located here on the Cuyabeno River in northeastern Ecuador, about a two hour boat ride down the river with a motorized canoe from Marian, the closest town. Most travelers arrive here from Quito, about a seven and a half hour bus ride away.
How to get to the Cuyabeno Dolphin Lodge
There’s two options of getting from Quito to El Puente Cuyabeno, where the lodge’s motorized canoe will pick you up to ferry you to the property.
Tourist bus
You can opt to purchase a tourist bus through the lodge, which picks you up in Quito the night before your Amazon experience is set to start. You can either get picked up at Plaza Foch Hostel Blue House at 11:00 p.m. or from the Hostel Secret Garden at 11:30 p.m. This costs $60 USD roundtrip per person.
This is the option that Justin and I went for and I’m SUPER glad we opted for it.
We got a bit unlucky while heading to the lodge—there was a landslide along our route (which are apparently very common amongst these parts) that caused us to be stuck on the bus for about twenty hours. Although it still wasn’t a particularly pleasant experience, the bus had provided us blankets and pillows that made our time on the bus more comfortable. Plus, Justin and I got the entire back row of the bus to sleep and snuggle together to keep warm. I can’t imagine that would have been our experience on the public bus!
Public bus
Alternatively, you can take a public bus, operated by Putumayo. It departs from the Quitumbe Bus Station, south of Quito, every day at 9 PM, to El Puente Cuyabeno, and costs about $32 USD roundtrip.
I can’t find any options online to purchase your tickets, so I’d suggest getting to the bus terminal with plenty of buffer time for you to hunt down Putumayo’s ticket office and purchase seats.
The Property at Cuyabeno Dolphin Lodge
Cuyabeno Dolphin Lodge is set on the Cuyabeno River, surrounded by lush jungle as far as the eye can see.
After your two hour boat ride on a motorized canoe down the river, there’s a small patio area, with wooden chairs, some hammocks, and a few pieces of gear, like a stand-up paddleboard that you’re free to use whenever you feel like it.
One of the main draws for me about the Cuyabeno Dolphin Lodge was that there’s a pod of pink river dolphins that live in the lagoon right in front of this patio area, so this is an excellent place to sit, enjoy a cup of coffee every morning, and keep your eyes peeled for dolphins. While we didn’t have much luck seeing these magical creatures here (although we did get to see them elsewhere), someone from our tour group actually got to go paddleboarding with a few of them!
Down a wooden boardwalk, to the right, you have the main dining area, which is an open air, covered building with long, wooden tables and plenty of chairs, as well as a small lounge area, where there’s some board games that you can play on a rainy day. When we visited, the weather was quite lovely, so I very much enjoyed the open air environment here, which made you feel totally immersed in the jungle.
The other buildings on site are modest staff buildings and a two-story structure with guest rooms (more on the rooms below!).
These buildings are all elevated on small stilts, as its property often floods during the rainy season. We visited near the start of the rainy season in March and certain areas of the property, like near the staff quarters, were already flooded—during our first morning at the lodge, there was a cayman right next to the boardwalk there!
To be honest, most of our time here was spent adventuring, so, outside of mealtimes, we didn’t spend that much time onsite. But, from our time there, it was a perfectly comfortable experience!
The Rooms at Cuyabeno Dolphin Lodge
As mentioned above, all guests get private rooms with at least one full size bed (you can get up to three beds in one room!), covered with mosquito nets, as well as a private bathroom, with a flushing toilet, sink, and shower that sometimes has hot water.
There were electrical lights in the bedroom, but no outlets—in the dining area, there’s a huge power strip where everyone can plug in and charge up during meal times or leave your devices during the day. The electrical power, which comes from a mixture of solar power and generators, is turned off every night at 10 PM and turns on every morning at 6 AM. We were always pretty pooped from the day’s adventures and in bed by 9 PM—so we never missed the lack of electricity!
There’s also a nice shelving unit in each room with plenty of space to unpack your belongings and some hooks to hang clothes. If I had one nitpicky complaint about the room, it’s that I wish there actually was more hooks or places to hang stuff in the room—all of our clothes got soaked here, between rain, swimming, and hiking through waist deep water, and we quickly ran out of places to hang them up to dry!
The room is constructed of wooden planks. While they did a decent job of keeping most big insects out (we didn’t see cockroaches, which are my arch nemesis, or the like here), there definitely will be some mosquitoes and other small insects that can sneak between the cracks in the walls and the floors. In our experience, the mosquito net did an awesome job of keeping us bite-free in the middle of the night!
Another thing that’s worth mentioning is that you’re not given keys and there’s no locks on the outside of the door. At first, this frankly made me a little uncomfortable, as we travel with a TON of expensive laptops and cameras, but it turned out to be a complete non-issue. Still, you might want to consider leaving your Rolexes at home for this one.
All in all, considering how remote the lodge is, we were overall impressed by how comfortable the rooms are here.
Activity Packages Offered by Cuyabeno Dolphin Lodge
Let’s be real—no one is coming out to Cuyabeno Dolphin Lodge to enjoy the rooms. You’re here to explore the Amazon! So let’s talk about the experience.
The lodge offers several multi-day packages, which range from two to five nights for standard stays or five night adventure that’s mostly devoted to paddling.
We picked the four day, three night package, which, for whatever reason, seemed to be the option that all of the other travelers that were staying during our visit selected as well.
I’m including a detailed account of everything included in the package we purchased below, but if you want the TLDR, we did a TON of different activities, ranging from paddling our own canoe while wildlife spotting and swimming at sunset in the Amazon to getting treated by an Amazonian shaman and learning how to make our own chocolate.
Along the way, we got to taste all kinds of cool Amazonian fruits and plants and saw WAY more wildlife than I was expecting, including four types of monkeys, river dolphins, and even an anaconda!
You’re welcome to sit out any activity you don’t want to participate in, but if you do want to join in all the activities (like we did!), you will stay BUSY during your time at the Cuyabeno Dolphin Lodge!
We had an ABSOLUTE blast during all of these activities and were blown away by the diversity of experiences they provided, as well as how knowledgeable and engaging the guides were while leading these experiences.
Best of all, ALL of these activities are included in your stay. In fact, the only additional money that we spent here was on a few beers with our dinners and a tip for our guides (pssst… in addition to cash, if you want to know what else to bring along, be sure to check out our Amazon rainforest packing list!).
Finally, one thing that I LOVED about Cuyabeno Dolphin Lodge (and really, many of the lodges in the Ecuadorian Amazon, as compared to other countries) is that they try to impact wildlife and plantlike as much as possible here. So, for example, you won’t find piranha fishing or instances of guides capturing and holding a cayman for a photo opp. For us, this was a HUGE benefit that made Cuyabeno Dolphin Lodge stand out amongst a bazillion other Amazon lodges.
Okay, if you care to read a breakdown of our experience at the lodge, here goes!
Our Experience Staying at the Cuyabeno Dolphin Lodge for Four Day/Three Night Stay
Unfortunately, we essentially lost almost a full day of our adventure from being stuck on our bus for 20 hours, but here’s what our time there looked like in a nutshell:
Day 1
Evening
We were picked up from El Puente Cuyabeno around 7 PM (about 8 hours later than scheduled due to that pesky landslide along the highway).
As we made the two hour cruise to our lodge, our guides kept an eye out in the trees for nocturnal snakes and in the water for caymans to show to us. However, I think they knew we were all hungry and exhausted and mostly just zoomed through the river to get us to lodge as quickly as possible.
After a filling dinner, we all promptly passed out.
Day 2
Morning through afternoon
After breakfast, we boarded the motorized canoes to start making our way to Taricaya, a remote community, deep in the Amazon jungle. As we made our way there, our guide stopped to point out animals, like macaws, howler monkeys, and toucans along the river.
We were dropped off in the jungle and hiked about an hour and a half through the dense forest to the community. To be honest, I was a bit surprised by how technically challenging parts of the hike were—for example, at times, you had to climb across huge puddles on narrow logs. I don’t think this hike would be particularly accessible for those that have limited mobility but—spoiler alert—the community is right on the river, so you can be dropped off by a boat, if you’re not up for the hike.
As you hike through the jungle, our guide pointed out various flora and fauna that can be used for medicinal purposes or eaten. We got to sample all kinds of cool exotic fruits that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to try, like white cacao and sapote, and brave members of our group got to try different types of ants and termites.
By noon, we had made it to Taricaya, which consisted of a small collection of extremely modest houses. A handful of women offered to sell us handicrafts and afterwards, we were given a presentation by the local shaman, about how they prepare and use ayahuasca. He also gave some folks, including Justin, a very *special* treatment that’s intended to cure joint and muscle ailments—be forewarned that it WILL sting!
Afterwards, we were shown how the local people harvest and use the root of the yuca plant and were able to help process the root to cook casabe, a crepe-like starch that served as part of our lunch. We happily munched down on casabe, as well as other local fruits and vegetables, while the community’s pet capybara, Pepa, made squeaking noises at our feet.
With our bellies full, we headed back to the lodge for a half hour or so of downtime before our evening activities.
Evening
Around golden hour, we zoomed down the Cuyabeno River to Laguna Grande, where we swam in the warm water as the sun cast golden hues on the submerged trees around us. Swimming in the Amazon was definitely one of the most magical parts of our experience here!
As it got dark, we went back to the lodge, keeping an eye out for snakes and caymans. Unfortunately, we didn’t see much, but there was thankfully a delicious dinner waiting for us.
Day 3
Morning
We went on a hike in the jungle surrounding Cuyabeno Dolphin Lodge, where, again, we learned about the various flora and fauna in the jungle. It had rained quite a bit before we visited, so we had to wade through SUPER high sections of water here—sometimes up to our waists!
Eventually, our guide decided the water was too high for us to continue wading through, so we went back to the lodge, changed out of our exceedingly wet clothes, and hopped into a non-motorized canoe that we paddled up river. This was one of the BEST wildlife spotting experiences on the trip—we saw four different types of monkeys, bats, several different types of tropical birds, basically everything you dream of about an Amazon adventure!
Afternoon
After lunch, it was a bit rainy so, instead of going out wildlife spotting, we did something at the lodge—made our own chocolate out of local cacao! For a relatively simple experience that included roasting, de-shelling, and grinding the beans, it was SUPER fun—and delicious, might I add!
We left around 4 PM in the motorized canoes to slowly make our way to the lagoon for sunset, keeping an eye out for wildlife along the way. And giving ourselves plenty of time turned out to be worth it—we FINALLY got to see two pink river dolphins really close to our boats!
Evening
After another sunset dip in Laguna Grande, we went on a nighttime hike to see all the creepy crawlies of the forest—and boy, did we ever! We saw colorful frogs, spiders of all sizes, tarantulas, and even one of the most venomous snakes in South America, a fer-de-lance.
Day 4
Morning
At 5:30 AM, there was an optional bird-watching canoe tour. As our last activity at the lodge, I happily got up and saw several different types of tropical birds and a brown-mantled tamarin monkey.
After breakfast, we packed our stuff into the canoes and headed back to El Puente Cuyabeno. The guides spotted TONS of wildlife along the way, including squirrel monkeys that literally leapt from tree to tree across the river, several saki monkeys, and the elusive anaconda. It was the perfect way to cap off our time in the Amazon.
Want to see more? We actually made a YouTube video about our experience at the lodge!
The Service at Cuyabeno Dolphin Lodge
I have nothing but positive things to say about the service we received at the lodge.
You’ll primarily interface with your guides during your stay at the lodge. As mentioned above, we were really impressed by both of the guides we had during our time here, Miguel and Elias—they were both knowledgeable and obviously passionate about the Amazon and educating others about its conservation.
Of course, there’s other staff at the lodge as well. Every time we returned to our room from an excursion, we’d come back to a clean and tidy room. The cooking and serving staff were attentive and happy to work with you if you have any dietary preferences.
The Crowd at Cuyabeno Dolphin Lodge
Justin and I are in our mid- to late 30s and were wondering whether we were going to be the *old* people at the lodge amongst a bunch of 18 year old backpackers. But that wasn’t the case at all!
There were a variety of different types of travelers—a solo female traveler in her 50s, a handful of early 20-something friends, and a mix of couples and solo travelers in their 30s and 40s.
If you’re looking for a raucous party experience, this probably isn’t the right Amazon lodge for you, but otherwise, I think you’ll feel right at home!
Cuyabeno Dolphin Lodge Review
So would I recommend that others stay at the Cuyabeno Dolphin Lodge?
Absolutely! So long as you’re not expecting an ultra-luxury or party-all-night kind of atmosphere, the Cuyabeno Dolphin Lodge offers an incredible bang-for-your-buck experience, with a diverse range of adventures throughout the Amazon and an extremely comfortable lodging experience. We honestly can’t wait to come back again—we just might pass on getting “healed” by the shaman next time.
We LOVED our stay at Cuyabeno Dolphin Lodge and thought it was one of the best bang-for-your-buck things we did in all of South America! Do you have any questions about our time in the Amazon? Let us know in the comments below!
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