It's midday, deep in the Peruvian Amazon.

The jungle is hot and the air is sticky.

And the day's ruso and a shaman's apprentice are resting on the top of a hill.

And then in the background, I hear this dull, like...

It sounded like a dull surge and roar and ocean wave that was constantly crashing.

His look thought that came to mind.

And I turn over to the shaman's apprentice and I ask him,

you know, like, what's that noise?

And he just kind of laughed and he said,

oh, it's the river.

Andres rushes down the hill through the massive trees.

Soon, the jungle opens up into a tiny canyon.

The closer Andres gets to the river, the harder it is to see it.

The whole canyon is full of billowing steam and it is hot.

Breathe in and it's...

That hot humid air goes into your nose, down into your neck and into your lungs.

And there's not too many places on planet Earth, I guess, where you can feel where your lungs are in your body because of that heat.

And it's... I mean, it was really otherworldly.

I'm Sarah Wyman and this is Atlas Obscura.

A celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

That is a recording of a boiling river in the Amazon.

In parts, it's almost 200 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to kill anything that falls into it.

...