Colombia

Colombia gives you four jungles for the price of one country, and they barely resemble each other. There's the lowland Amazon around Leticia, all river-access lodges and canopy treehouses reached by motorized canoe. There's Minca, the cloud forest climbing the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta above the Caribbean, which is where the treehouses cluster thickest. There's the Pacific coast of Chocó around Nuquí, where rainforest runs straight into the surf. And there's the dry tropical forest around Tayrona National Park — drier and scrubbier than the rest, but still loud with monkeys and birds.

How you arrive depends entirely on which forest you're after. Minca and Tayrona run off Santa Marta: a taxi or 4x4, and a motorbike for the steep Minca tracks that defeat ordinary cars. The Amazon means flying to Leticia and continuing by motorized canoe. Chocó is the committed one — a small plane from Medellín to Nuquí, then a motorboat up the coast, and that's the only way in. Tayrona you reach by road, then walk or ride horseback to the parts worth seeing.

The Caribbean side, Minca and Tayrona, is driest around December to March and again July to August. Chocó is wet more or less year-round, but the humpback whales arrive July to October and make the rain worth it. Leticia has no real dry season, though lower water from June to November makes the trails easier. Expect howler monkeys, pink river dolphins in the Amazon, the 300-plus birds of the Sierra Nevada with their endemics, sloths, blue morpho butterflies, and the whales offshore in Chocó.