On a hot and humid morning, I lay in a hammock under a towering fig tree, serenaded by the call of wild birds fluttering about in the Amazonian wilderness.

We had arrived in Puerto Maldonado, the gateway to the Peruvian Amazon, just the previous evening. After a month in the high altitude city of Cusco and the Sacred Valley, I felt a strange uneasiness from being at sea level again. Is low altitude sickness a thing, I wondered?

A gentle breeze cooled the humidity on my skin and lured me ...