According to Alyssa Kullberg, a postdoctoral researcher in plant ecology at the Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne (EPFL), you only see the Boiling River in front of you when you cross a crest in the rainforest on a four-hour, bumpy drive towards it. In the broad, saucer-like dip below, a clutch of trees produces enormous billows of steam.
“It was so magical,” recalls Kullberg, recalling her first personal experience of seeing it. In east-central Peru, the Boiling River, sometimes called the Shanay-timpishka or La Bomba, is a tributary that joins the powerful Amazon River.
