TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/061791/0617330.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 10.1 KB | 209 lines

                                                                                ENVIRONMENT, Page 80

Taking a Guided Tour Through Eden


The pristine reaches of the Amazon are home to a new kind of
adventure that emphasizes studying nature, not gaining thrills

By EUGENE LINDEN


    Couched at the top of one of countless waterfalls that
bathe the southeastern foothills of the Peruvian Andes, I enjoy
the cool breath of the cascade, which takes the edge off the
equatorial sun. From nearby promontories, an observer can look
upward to the cloud forests that cling to the mountainous rim
of the Amazon basin, or down into the steamy lowland rain
forests that extend thousands of miles to the east. As far as
the eye can see and beyond, there are no villages, roads or
towns. Lying below is the Manu, a 7,000-sq.-mi. area as choked
with plant and animal life as it was before Europeans landed in
the New World 500 years ago.

    The hike to the waterfall is part of a trip that began by
rugged and fat-tired mountain bicycle in a forest of tiny trees
and giant plants at 11,300 ft. on the very rim of the Amazon
basin and will continue by white-water raft, motorized canoe and
dugout canoe into the swampy lowlands. The guided excursion is
designed as an experiment in ecotourism, where the focus is on
nature rather than on stimulating thrills. The aim is to attract
paying customers into previously inaccessible areas with minimal
disruption of the surroundings.

    An irony of global conservation is that the most pristine
areas remaining on earth are in remote, often anarchic regions
where instability and lack of facilities keep the world at bay.
In near bankrupt and chaotic Peru, bad roads and a State
Department travel advisory warning about the insurgency of the
Shining Path guerrillas cut the number of American visitors to
the Manu in 1990 to 80, fewer than those who chose to visit
Beirut. The area, however, is one of the few places in South
America where the primordial Amazon is on display.

    The Manu is just being opened to ecotourism, but this new
form of travel -- definitely not a luxury business -- has taken
hold in a growing number of countries. Before civil war made
travel too dangerous, visitors annually paid $10 million in
government fees for the opportunity to see mountain gorillas in
Rwanda's Parc des Volcans, giving citizens in that small, poor
nation a stake in the survival of the giant apes. In Costa Rica
nearly one-third of the 260,000 annual visitors cite the
country's natural wonders as a reason for going, which helps
stiffen government resolve to protect its uniquely varied
forests. Specialized travel companies have sprung up to satisfy
budding ecotourist demand. Texas-based Victor Emanuel Nature
Tours, for example, offers many destinations, including the
Manu; the rich, northerly cloud forests in Chiapas, Mexico; and
a number of remote South Pacific islands.

    The opening of the Manu was orchestrated by Charles Munn,
a Baltimore-born ornithologist who works there under the
sponsorship of Wildlife Conservation International, an arm of
the New York Zoological Society. The conventional wisdom had
been that it was difficult to see Amazon wildlife in the vast,
inaccessible forests, but in 1976, when Munn began exploring the
oxbow lakes created by the meandering Manu River, he was
dumbfounded by the wealth of living things he saw. The region
contains more than 1,000 species of native birds, including the
largest concentration of macaws in the world. Giant river
otters, jaguars, caimans, 100-lb. rodents known as capybara and
at least 13 species of monkey can also be spotted. Deep in the
forest live Kogapakori Indians, who have no contact with the
outside world. Thinly populated and remote, the Manu has been
troubled neither by the Shining Path guerrillas nor the
continent's cholera epidemic.

    The region's lakes are located in a roughly 1,200-sq.-mi.
zone that the government set aside to generate income for the
local economy. Suggested schemes included the harvesting of
monkeys for bio medical research and the killing of other
animals for meat. Munn proposed that the authorities take
advantage of the relative proximity by air of the Andean city
of Cuzco and encourage small ecotourism ventures. Cuzco, a tidy
colonial city and the capital of the ancient Incan empire,
already serves as the gateway to Macchu Picchu. The Manu is but
a 45-minute hop by private plane from the city's jetport.

    Munn backed his proposal with personal loans to local
entrepreneurs. "I could see that nothing was going to happen
unless I intervened," he says. Since 1984 Manu tourist
accommodations have grown from a scattering of primitive
campsites into a less primitive but still modest venture. The
24-bed Manu Lodge was designed by proprietor Boris Gomez, who
scavenged wood from mahogany trees snagged in riverbanks in
order to minimize the lodge's impact on the surrounding forests.
The lodge has no electricity and a pleasant camplike feel, and
Gomez is able to break even with as few as 150 visitors a year
-- far below the number that might harm the region.

    Munn has started a revolving fund to help other ambitious
locals. Gustavo Moscoso, a onetime logger, plans to make his
living as an ecoinnkeeper in a biologically rich area called
Pantiacolla. Farther down the Madre de Dios River, Abraham
Huaman, a Quechua Indian guide, is building a lodge on land
adjacent to a mineral lick where hundreds of macaws flock to
taste the soil. Huaman patrols where hunters once shot macaws,
and his family and workers have driven out illegal loggers.

    Ecotourists brought by Gomez to the Manu take part in a
program that is a mixture of lodging and camping. We began by
mountain bike at the very rim of the Amazon basin, riding
through misty forests. The high-altitude region is home to dwarf
trees as well as giant begonias, which Munn described as looking
like Audrey, the man-eating plant in Little Shop of Horrors.
Below the rim, the trees become bigger and the foliage more
lush.

    That night our group (which consisted of Gomez, Munn, his
wife Martha and me) camped in tents set up on the foundation of
a new lodge Gomez is building in the cloud forest. Home to the
endangered spectacled bear, a brilliant orange bird called cock
of the rock and dozens of species of hummingbirds, the forest is
an utterly green world. Plants, mosses and trees are so thick on
the vertiginous mountain slopes that trails have a
trampoline-like feel underfoot.

    As we continued into the Amazon basin by mountain bike and
white-water raft, the temperature and humidity rose.
Cloud-forest plants and animals began to give way to parrots,
fasciated tiger herons -- a hunter of large fish and snakes that
looks like it is wearing a herringbone overcoat -- and other
lowland creatures. We settled for the night at Amazonia Lodge,
a former tea plantation across from the tiny river port of
Atalaya. The owner, Santiago Yabar, tells us that he first
visited the plantation as a tax collector in the 1970s, then
later bought it and transformed its run-down buildings into an
extremely agreeable inn.

    Experts have called Amazonia the best bird-watching lodge
in the world because it sits at the juncture of a zone where
birds from upland peaks mingle with lowland species. For many
years the Manu held the record for sightings of different
species in a single day: 331. With no effort whatsoever, we
spotted more than 100 species in the course of five days. A
short canoe ride from the Manu Lodge, visitors can see the
nesting sites of hoatzins, perhaps the world's strangest birds.
The floppy, pheasant-sized avians have three stomachs, like
cows; the young defend themselves by diving from their nests
into the water. When danger has passed, they use hooks on the
leading edge of their wings to climb back up the trees into
their dwellings.

    The Manu is also one of the few places on earth where
visitors can see giant river otters. The aggressive 70-lb.
mammals make their home on lakes upstream from the lodge. Viewed
from the vantage point of a dugout canoe, one otter family
offered an idyllic vision of life in the wild, frolicking from
one side of the lake to the other, while pausing occasionally
to feast on abundant fish.

    The exuberantly colored and gregarious macaws, however,
are the celebrity fauna of the region. During a three-hour
motorized canoe ride up the Manu River, we saw 327 of the
loquacious birds in a scintillating array of colors: red and
green, blue and yellow, scarlet. Munn estimates that each macaw
in the region could generate between $750 and $4,700 a year in
tourist revenue -- far more over the bird's lifetime than if the
animals were caught and sold.

    He touches upon the basic logic of ecotourism: wildlife is
more valuable running free than killed or captured. But it will
be difficult to bring the benefits of tourist dollars to the
more traditional Indian tribes of the region without disrupting
their way of life. Some of the tribes will trade elaborate
traditional cloaks called kushmas, which take three months to
make, for a machete or an ax -- far below what tourists would
pay for the same item. Peruvian biologist Ernesto Raez fears,
however, that encouraging the Indians to reorganize themselves
to serve even small numbers of tourists will require profound
transformations in village life. "We should not ask conservation
to do the work of social change," he says.

    No doubt there are pitfalls to every kind of ecotourist
venture. Whether it preserves or disturbs a region and its
inhabitants depends entirely on the sensitivity of the people
who decide the scale and nature of tourist operations. Moreover,
all too often nations and peoples develop an interest in saving
ecosystems only after they have been nearly destroyed by
exploitation. The great virtue of ecotourism is that it allows
people to profit from undisturbed nature. There is little doubt
that tourism ventures motivated by respect for nature are
preferable to the kind of commercialization that in the past has
ruined so many of the world's natural wonders.