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Branches came crashing down and leaves tumbled around me. Over my head, a howler monkey was putting on a display, standing upright, chest puffed out, pelting me with whatever was at hand. Eventually, realising that this grinning biped wasn’t going anywhere, he gave up, sat astride his lofty branch and went back to eating fruit.
That was just one of many captivating encounters in Madidi national park, a vast swath of pristine wilderness in the Bolivian Amazon. To get there, I’d flown north from La Paz to the sweltering jungle town of Rurrenabaque. Then it was a six-hour journey in a wooden motorboat, chugging gently along the Beni and Tuichi rivers, through sky-high gorges and gallery forest, spotting kingfishers, herons and caiman as I went.
In 1981, Israeli-Australian backpacker Yossi Ghinsberg had a very different experience. At the age of 22, he went off the trail and deep into uncharted Madidi in search of lost tribes and hidden treasure. His dream turned into a nightmare when he was separated from his three companions – two of whom disappeared without trace.
For three weeks, he survived on his wits, willpower and, he believes, sheer providence. Sleep-deprived and starving, he took on the elements, fire ants, venomous snakes and a marauding jaguar, before being rescued against all the odds by his friend Kevin Gale and the hunter-gatherer community of San José de Uchupiamonas, who are Madidi’s ancestral landowners. The movie Jungle, starring Daniel Radcliffe as Ghinsberg, is based on his book Jungle: a Harrowing True Story of Adventure, Danger and Survival.
But the story didn’t end there. Ten years later, Ghinsberg returned to Uchupiamonas to find the community dying out, their children all leaving for the city. Their dream was to build an ecolodge, where members of the community could share their culture with visitors from around the globe. Ghinsberg helped them secure funds from the Inter-American Development Bank and lived with the community for three years, developing Chalalan Ecolodge, which continues to support the Uchupiamona, as well as being a beacon of community-run tourism.
From the river, it was a 2km hike along the Jaguar Trail to the lodge, heralded by raucous parrots and toucans. But once there I suffered no Ghinsberg-style privations: I feasted on just-caught catfish and papaya from the garden, then slept like a baby, cocooned in my thatched cabaña, with its mahogany floor and flush toilet.
At 6am the next day I was immersed in the incessant hum of the forest, picking my way along one of Chalalan’s many trails and wobbling over log bridges in the wake of my machete-wielding guide, Ovidio.
Shafts of sunlight pierced the canopy as we admired forest riches – the hairy legs of a tarantula peeking from its hole, a flamboyant poison dart frog, no bigger than a thumbnail. I thought of Ghinsberg and his makeshift bed crafted from a tattered poncho and palm fronds as I squeezed between the gargantuan buttress roots of a kapok tree, enveloped in the musky scent of a jaguar.
Bridging the tropical Andes and the Amazon, Madidi, a national park since 1995, brims with life, with 15 major vegetation types and an altitudinal span of almost 6,000 metres. Indeed, Identidad Madidi, a study of the park’s flora and fauna, led by Dr Rob Wallace of the US’s Wildlife Conservation Society, aims to show that Madidi is the most biologically diverse protected area in the world.
As the field phase draws to a close, Wallace told me that it’s exceeded all expectations: “At the beginning, we thought that registering 100 additional vertebrates would be a success. Now, after studying 13 of the 15 sites, we’re close to 300 additional vertebrates, more than 600 additional butterflies and well over 300 additional plants and, overall, we must be very close to 100 candidate new species for science.”
“Two of the most surprising discoveries to date are a plant used as incense for more than a century that ended up a new species to science, clusia pachamamee, and finding the Madidi titi monkey over a decade ago.”
Back at the lodge, lunch was interrupted by a 100-strong procession of monkeys. Lean and agile brown capuchins were closely followed by scampering squirrel monkeys – they feel safer in the company of their larger cousins. In between, a lone black spider monkey put on an impressive show of aerial gymnastics.
In the heat of the afternoon, I took a tentative dip in the tea-coloured lake, while the resident caimans napped (it’s safe to swim in daylight, I was told), plunging through the sun-warmed surface to cooler depths. Then I flopped into a hammock and was lulled to sleep by a chorus of caws, chirrups and trills.
Ghinsberg stresses that Jungle is not only a story of survival but also one of self-discovery. Now he has been initiated into the Uchupiamona as a village brother, or wawqi in Quechua.
“My lifelong dream has been fulfilled and I have found my treasure – learning from the forest and its people, and serving them. And there’s urgent work to do. Madidi is under threat from the same government that created the Law of the Rights of Mother Earth.”
He’s referring to President Evo Morales’s goal to turn Bolivia into the energy powerhouse of South America, including two proposed hydroelectric megadams on the Beni river, to generate electricity primarily for export. The controversial project would submerge parts of Madidi and Pilón Lajas biosphere reserve, affecting 17 communities, including Uchupiamona, displacing 4,000 people and destroying their way of life.
“The flooding will kill plants, wildlife will lose its habitat and communities will disappear. What can we do?” Ovidio said, as he paddled me across the lake in a dugout, the reflected trees like Rorschach inkblots in the mirror-still water. As we headed back to Rurrenabaque, a notoriously elusive tapir – with a face like an anteater, similar in shape to a pig and but the size of a donkey – swam alongside us for an instant, before fleeing into the forest. A shaggy capybara, the world’s largest rodent, was drinking at the river’s edge, and two harpy eagles surveyed their terrain from a leafless tree.
I remembered Ghinsberg’s words: “Madidi is not just a problem for the Uchupiamona: it’s a call to the world to wake up and protect what is not ours to destroy.”
• The trip was provided by Tribes Travel, which has a three-day full-board stay at Chalalan Ecolodge from £995pp, including return flights from La Paz-Rurrenabaque, airport tax, park fees, boat transfers and all activities
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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From Andes to Amazon: trekking through the Bolivian junglehttps://goo.gl/u8fN3Z
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