Amboró National Park, Bolivia, 8-9 Sept 2003

Amboró National Park, Bolivia, 8-9 Sept 2003


I waded trouserless into the turbid river. A couple of metres in, the water was waisthigh and flowing powerfully; I dug my feet into the silty bottom, fearing I'd lose my footing. But a couple of steps on, the water shallowed, sloping upwards to the white sands on the far bank. I trod barefoot along the sand, and then through a mucky channel where 14 million dollars had been "spent on" a failed river diversion project. Bamboo stands leaned and creaked; a blue iridescence flashed into the corner of my eye - a saucer-sized butterfly folding and dropping, opening and rising. Fields of squat palm trees had replaced the crowding rainforest.

Don Wilfredo had built his house from bamboo and ferns; his grandson Daniel, 4, gleefully chased chicks from kitchen to yard and back again. His calm, fine-featured grandmother told him off for squeezing them too tight. The house's puppy playfully dropped its shoulders - paws outstretched, looking up at Daniel. His grandmother warned against touching the dog; like all the village dogs at this time of year, it was mangy and wretched: hip bones jutting, ribcages pushing through inflamed, erratically tufted skin.

Don Wilfredo was a slight man with a baccy-yellow moustache and a thoughtful expression. His face was weathered and deeply wrinkled, but you could tell he'd been handsome once. His left foot was bandaged - he'd accidentally macheted it while off on the farm. Don Wilfredo had come to El Carmen over 30 years ago, when a drought drove his family off their farm in the southern lowlands. Unlike many uneducated people in remote areas, he was extremely interested in the world outside - his intelligence allowed him to visualise and relate to things beyond his own experience. He'd built from scratch an encyclopaedic knowledge of the local creatures - the other villagers respected this expertise, even if Wilfredo was a 'camba' (lowlander).

Almost everyone in El Carmen is a 'colla' - a highlander, a refugee from the mining communities of Bolivia's altiplano. These miners had worked in primitive, unstable tunnels at altitudes that sometimes neared 6,000 metres. For most of us, it is difficult to form an idea of just how unbelievably tough these conditions would have been. Centuries ago, the Spanish had tried getting African slaves to do this work - but they died like flies in the thin air and the savage cold. The descendants of the few African survivors now live in temperate parts of the Yungas - awesomely steep valleys that drop from Bolivia's great Cordillera del Este right down to the Amazon rainforest.

In the 1980s (I think), the government sold off a failing industry to the multinationals. Machines took over, wages plummeted, and migration accelerated. Miners left the gelid altiplano to begin a new life as farmers in the bug-infested sauna of the 'Oriente' - in place like El Carmen.

Urbelinda Ferrufino, who runs a local NGO, says that "in one way, it was kind of a sport - really interesting, because they'd been living almost in a desert, without anything green - they'd never farmed the land. Well, that was all nice and romantic. But once they'd finished their savings, they didn't have anything to eat. They'd be trapped by the swollen rivers for weeks during the rainy season. And the illnesses began to spread. Yellow fever, malaria, tuberculosis because of bad diet and the climate - pretty soon after they arrived, it was a public health disaster."

But the collas are still down in Amboró, their culture being gradually reworked by the unrelenting demands of the rainforest.

I slept on a pile of rice in the loft above the kitchen. No beeps, drunken shouts or thudding bass in the distance; just waves of wind swishing millions of leaves - vast sonic entities moving through the trees around me. Every so often, the crowing of cocks burst indelicately into this symphony, subtle as a drunkard spewing onto a log fire.

Walking before first light - circle of torchlight jerking across dark trees; slimy holes in the dirt road; curled dogs, horses standing quietly in the darkness. Luis, Don Wilfredo's son, opened a shack door where the owner of a horse was lying in bed with 'the other woman.' He squinted puffy-eyed away from the torch glare, swinging his legs from under the coarse grey blanket. I wandered behind the two men on thin paths through fields of rushes and along the leafstrewn jungle floor, calling for the horse in the cool predawn of a rainforest winter.

Back at Don Wilfredo's, I washed my face in one half of a 10-inch fruitshell. Adult and juvenile chickens began flurrying down to earth, hopping down from branch to branch before making the last big fluttering jump. The chicks, of course, couldn't fly up to roost, and some wild animal had been taking them at nighttime. But the factory churns them out for about five cents each, so the loss was manageable.

Don Wilfredo asked if I'd like some yucca to bring back to my country - he'd dig it up for me while I was off looking for evidence of illegal tree felling with Luis. Yucca is a tuber a little like a potato - delicious when cut into fat strips and deep fried.

Once up on the horse, I quickly realised a 7-hour horse ride would destroy my bony ass, so I walked along as Luis rode one of the horses; the other was manned by his friend, whose buck teeth added pizzazz to his hillbilly mien.

The jungle thickened as the communities died out. Luxuriant plant life fought slow, merciless battles for sunlight, water, minerals. Trees in the twisting, suffocating embrace of vines. A caterpillar: a flexing sea of curved whitish bristles. A beetle, geometrically patterned in shining hues of green - it daubs would be predators with sticky, retch-inducing anal extrusions. Treetrunk metropoli - tiny, slender bees, chambers oozing with dark honey, rich as a liqueur.

Inside Amboró Park's no-go protected area, the path narrowed, occasionally blocked by fallen trees riddled with holes.

At the river, I was about to turn back, but Luis spotted some planks of wood cut from the endangered mara tree. They'd probably only been there since last night - on a sandbank in the middle of the river, we could see footprints where young men had run barefoot and barelegged, shepherding the mara planks downriver in the darkness. This could only be done after rain, when the river was high enough.

I got my photos and headed back to collect my yucca off Don Wilfredo. I had to get moving - the next day I'd be on a plane back to Dublin.