Here I am on a river boat that looked like something out of the African Queen and I discovered that the Amazon Basin covers 7,045,000 kilometers or 1/12 of the earths circumference and passes through or fringes nine countries. There are 15,000 tributaries of which 12 exceed 1,600 kilometers in length. It is estimated that the basin contains a fifth of the worlds freshwater.

The water flow is 200 million liters per second which is four times larger than it's nearest rival, the Congo, and 60 times greater than the Nile. This relates to the entire annual water consumptiom of Greater London passing through the river's mouth each second.

The river begins its journey high in the Peruvian Andeasf some 35 kilometers south of Cailloma, this small trickle becomes the Hornillos River which flows into the Apurimac, the Ene, Tambo, Ucayali, Maranon and finally the Amazonas. At Iquito in Peru, the river has traveled 1/3 of its distance yet has dropped down to 106 meters above sea level and is now over four kilometers wide. When the river meets the Rio Negro at Manaus, it is 48 meters above the sea level and is almost six kilometers wide with still 1,600 kilometers to go.

At certain places the river exceeds seven kilometers and achieves a depth of 124 meters (407 feet). The Amazon is navigatable all the way to Iquitos, Peru, for ocean-going vessels there are 48,000 kilometers of navigable waters throughout the basin. When the river reaches the Atlantic Ocean, its estuary is more than 80 kilometers wide and fresh water can be found 40 nautical miles out to sea