Puyo is well connected by bus. From Quito, buses leave from the Quitumbe terminal in the south on a five-hour run over the Andes and down into the eastern lowlands. Cooperativa San Francisco runs a reliable route. From Baños, it is a 90-minute ride that cost about 2.75 USD in August 2023 - one of the most scenic stretches in Ecuador, passing waterfalls and following the Pastaza River gorge. There is a small airport at Shell, roughly 10 kilometers northwest, but it mainly handles light aircraft flying into Amazon communities. No major commercial flights serve the area. Charter and emergency flights are available for those who need them. Within the city, most attractions are walkable. Local buses cost 30 cents. Taxis within Puyo are a flat 1.25 USD, rising to 1.50 if you want to cross the entire urban area.

The Omaere Ethnobotanical Park, along the Paseo Turístico del Río Puyo at the northeast edge of town, is where Puyo reveals itself as an Amazon city. Local indigenous guides lead visitors through collections of medicinal and ritual plants native to the region, explaining which bark reduces fever, which leaves treat parasites, which flowers feature in Kichwa cosmology, and which plants were once used to ward off evil spirits. Tours run in English and Spanish for a small fee. Nearby, a mirador overlooking the Puyo River, the Omaere park, and the city costs nothing at all. Beyond the park, the region's waterfalls become day trips. The cascade in Triunfo, along the road to Arajuno, is one of the most impressive. Tour operators arrange rafting on the Pastaza, kayaking, and canopy zip-lining. Many outfits partner with indigenous communities, running tourism that supports rather than exploits the people whose territory this is.

Zona Obrero is Puyo's unexpected contribution to Ecuadorian nightlife. On weekends, the district fills with students from the Universidad Estatal Amazónica - locals and visitors alike - and the bars run close together, playing everything from salsa to electronic. The effect is concentrated: a small town's worth of places packed into a few blocks. Café Escobar, in a more central location downtown, takes a different tack: artisanal beer, cocktails, and variations on chicha, the fermented yuca drink that has been made in the Amazon for thousands of years. Mama Mia in barrio Obrero serves salads, burritos, sandwiches, and hamburgers. For cheap lunches, the Mercado Mariscal or Mercado de los Platanos on their second floors offer complete almuerzos - soup, main dish, drink - between 1.75 and 2.50 USD. On Sundays the markets have their freshest produce.

Near the terminal terrestre, restaurants serve almost exclusively Amazonian cuisine. The signature dish is maito - typically fish, sometimes chicken, wrapped in bijao leaves and cooked over coals, with the leaves imparting a subtle vegetable flavor the grill alone cannot produce. Alongside maito on the menu is chontacura: the fat larva of the chonta palm weevil, skewered and roasted, an indigenous Kichwa food that urban Ecuadorians have lately rediscovered as a regional delicacy. Volquetero, another regional specialty, is found in many restaurants in the Obrero neighborhood. Traditional, filling, inexpensive. The Wao fairtrade handicraft store in the center sells work by the Waorani people, one of the indigenous nations whose ancestral territory extends east of Puyo toward the Yasuní rainforest. Everything about the city's food and craft culture insists on its Amazonian identity - not the Andean Ecuador of Quito's colonial churches, but the eastern country that begins at Puyo's edge and continues, unbroken forest, almost to the Atlantic.