As we cross the northern fringe of the Andes, the airplane windows begin to sweat – a portent of the coming heat – and little by little the mountains dissolve into a sea of foaming green. The plane sweeps low over jungle calligraphed by service roads and tawny rivers, finally touching down on a grass runway. As we taxi toward the terminal building, I consider my luck: This is the first plane to land in Rurrenabaque in three days.
I've abandoned the cosmopolitan moonscape of Bolivia's capital, La Paz, for the buzzing equatorial wet of the Amazon. With its gravel streets and cafés catering, alternately, to locals and adventure tourists, Rurrenabaque is a town in transition: newly prosperous, at once cheerful and seedy, buoyed by the competing interests of the ecotourism and logging industries. The air smells of rain and fresh-sawn wood. Clapboard houses overlook a square shaded by palms.
I'm en route to Parque Nacional Madidi, which, along with the Manu Biosphere Reserve in neighbouring Peru, makes up one of South America's largest protected areas. As you would expect of any 19,000-square-kilometre swath of primary rain forest, Madidi teems with a staggering diversity of animal life – it's home to at least one-10th of the world's bird species and boasts a monkey found nowhere else on the planet. The simian in question, the Madidi titi, was “discovered” in 2004.
“This was strange to us, because we've known about the monkey for centuries,” my guide, Alejandro Alvarez, says as we board a motorized canoe and begin the five-hour journey into the heart of the park. Alvarez belongs to the Tacana Quechua people who run Chalalán Ecolodge, where we're headed. The clash of local and official knowledge is to be a recurring topic during the trip, the titi a symbol of its absurdity. Alvarez won't promise a sighting – they're secretive animals – but he won't exclude the possibility, either.
The Rio Beni flows widely and powerfully through low jungled mountains. Balding slabs of rock menace the river; the wind teases their stringy comb-overs of vine. Gradually the mountains flatten out and the water takes on a more turbulent aspect, rippling like flexed muscle as it humps over sandbanks and troughs the shallows. A capibarra lopes along the riverbank.
Two boatmen share the task of navigating these almost-rapids. One operates the rudder while the other guides the boat with a long stick, testing the depth and signalling to the rudderman when to ease up on the throttle, when to turn. I ask Alvarez whether the poler, a teenager dressed in fatigues, is military. My guide looks amused. “He just likes the style. But he will be very happy that he fooled you.”
The other passengers are deposited on a muddy outcrop in what, to the untrained eye, looks like the middle of nowhere. They disappear into long grass with grocery bags hanging from their wrists. Only as we reach the middle of the river can I see signs of the village beyond: a helix of smoke above the trees, the peaked roof of a hut.
The establishment of the park, in 1995, was a minor political coup that anticipated the indigenous rights reforms of president Evo Morales a decade later. As Alvarez explains, the Madidi region had been a jigsaw of logging concessions, “owned,” like much of the Amazon, by the country's elite and the rogues who cut deals with them. For years, environmentalists pressed the government to protect Madidi's plant and animal riches from clear-cutting, without success.
In the early 1990s, activist Rosa Maria Ruiz mobilized the region's politically disparate indigenous groups. Their protests, coupled with a study by Conservation International that determined that Madidi contained the most biodiverse rain forest in the country, were enough for the World Bank to declare it a priority conservation area. The Bolivian government finally relented.
