Saving the Rainforest and Avoiding Rabies

Despite its chronic instability, the Chapare is an absolutely amazing place. Villa Tunari has a lazy, laid back feel, with abundant cold cerveza and swimming holes. For me, the main attractions were the national parks and tiny villages outside of town.

Getting to the Parque Nacional Carrasco proved a challenge, because it’s a few miles out of town and I couldn’t find a taxi. Luckily, the owner of my hotel lent me his moto. A gringa, riding a motorcycle through the countryside, skirt and long hair flying, stirring up dust and scaring everyone’s chickens, made for quite a sight, but it was super fun. Getting inside the park was also an experience. There’s a huge river between the ranger station and the protected area, which we got to cross in a zippy little cable car contraption.

Parque Nacional Carrasco encompasses over 600,000 hectacres of cloudforest, starting in the altiplano, plunging down the steep Andean hillsides into the rainforest river basin. The tiny bit I explored was home a rainbow of birds, reptiles and insects. My favorties were the blue morpho butterflies, which are impossible to photograph, and the bullet ants, which indigenous communities used to use to punish people guilty of serious crimes. They would tie them to a tree and stir up the ants, which would kill most people in a few hours. My guide also insisted on surprising me with “algo super cool,” in a cave, which turned out to be vampire bats. He was a little taken aback by my response to the bats, running screaming out of the cave. I was more interested in walking around the rainforest, just taking the unique jungle smell and the cacophony of crazy bird, bug and snake sounds.

While the part of the park we explored has had more human impact, the interior of the park is so impenetrable that it’s still pristine. Jaguar, tapir, peccary, tropical bear, giant anteaters and thousands of other species live in the biodiversity hotspot. Its home to over a hundred species of orchids. There are even reports of an uncontacted Yuracaré tribe in the interior. Unfortunately, the edges of the park are quickly being eroded by logging, hunting and settlement. Enforcement is virtually impossible with a few dozen rangers for thousands of hectares. The threats come from all sectors, from major multinational corporations to subsistence farmers trying to scratch out a living.

Corporations are an easy culprit. In the Chapare, they’re really only involved in hardwood logging. In the Beni, Pando, and Santa Cruz, soybean cash cropping and cattle ranching are bigger issues. In Santa Cruz and the Chaco, hydrocarbon exploration and extraction cuts huge access roads through the forest, never mind the effects of oil spills from poorly constructed and cared for pipelines.

In the Chapare, poor people are often the unwitting culprits. In many cases, the parks are created around communities who live in or off of the forest. In other cases, migrants from the altiplano, desperate for a little scrap of land, illicitly settle in the parks. Some are modern hunter-gatherers, poaching plants and animals that fetch high prices. Others are farmers, whose slash and burn agriculture and grazing animals contribute to deforestation. Once cleared, the nutrients in rainforest soils are quickly depleted and the settlers have to clear more land, creating a cycle of deforestation and the eventual loss of biodiversity, soil erosion, disruption of the water cycle and climate change, making cultivation even more difficult. The tensions between sustainability and subsistence for those on the edge were aptly illustrated in Parque Machia and Villa Tunari.

Parque Machia is a refuge for rescued animals that have been poached and kept as pets. The better part of the park was closed, damaged by the recent rains. Fortunately, the park’s monkey population had relocated to the ranger station. Since they’ve had so much human contact, they actually wanted to be closer to humans. They were super inquisitive and sociable. The squirrel monkey pictured here was absolutely adorable, until he stole my sunglasses. When I tried to take them back, he bit me! Fortunately, it didn’t break the skin, and he finally agreed to swap my sunglasses for some grapes.

Back in Villa Tunari I went to a local comedor for lunch. As is the norm, there was no menu, just a special of the day. After a few bites, unable to identify the animal, I asked what it was. I was eating jochi, or agouti, an endangered animal akin to a guinea pig. The next day I went to a different comedor asked what the special was. “Taitateu,” I was told. When I asked what kind of an animal it was the proprieties claimed it was chancho, or pork. Unfortunately, when the plate arrived, it was clearly not pork. “Chancho de monte,” the woman clarified, which is peccary, an endangered wild pig. After that I finally wised up and just asked for fish.

There’s a new picasa album up with more pictures. Unfortunatly, they, like playing Amazon Trail as a kid, can't quite do the jungle justice.