Into the Lost World: Bolivia's Noel Kempff Mercado
Thoughts of long-term travel have gotten me thinking about trips past, so I sat down and penned this post about an adventure we had in Bolivia.
A stabbing pain shot through the top of my sandal-clad foot. "¡Dame la mano!" Dominga screeched, the feathers at the back of his neck bristling. "¡Dame la mano!" he demanded again, shifting his weight so another talon could find purchase and dig deeper into my already suffering foot. I had no idea what to do about this. A large blue and yellow macaw was standing on my foot, squawking demands at me in Spanish. I looked around the compound, confused, until Dominga's owner set me straight. "He's just begging. He wants you to give him your hand so he can climb up onto your shoulder... He wants treats." I lowered my hand, and Dominga scurried up my arm, claws raking thin tracks into my skin, before settling near the nape of my neck and nibbling greedily at my ear.
We had arrived in Florida, a speck on the map a few hours from our final destination. My body was still vibrating from the nine-hour, bone-jarring ride from Carmen Ruiz. I was tired, dirty, and pissed off. The icing on the cake was a foot now being impaled by the claws of an overgrown parakeet demanding I become his new feeding perch. I was not in my happy place. Thankfully, Cindy handed me a beer a few minutes later. I wasn't sure where it came from, and frankly I didn't care. She knew she needed to somehow calm the savage beast. Days earlier she'd made me swear I would try to enjoy this trip. It was something she really wanted to do, and my current foul mood wasn't part of the bargain. It would not be the last time I'd be reminded of our pact on this journey. I drank my beer broodingly, hoped Dominga's claws didn't hit an artery, and watched Marco, our guide, dig a mass of dead and dying butterflies out of the Jeep's grill. They were everywhere on the road and had impaled themselves on the front of the Jeep with reckless abandon. He needed to clear them out so we wouldn't overheat on the next day's drive.
Our journey had started three days earlier in La Paz, where we'd been based for the past three weeks, using the city to explore the country. I was ready to move south to Argentina and the promise of a beachside bungalow, but Cindy was up for one more adventure into the wilds of Bolivia. She'd read about a seldom-visited national park called Noel Kempff Mercado, tucked into northeastern Bolivia and spanning over 3.7 million acres, one of the most biologically diverse places on earth. Established in 1979 and originally named Parque Nacional Huanchaca, it was later renamed in honor of Professor Noel Kempff Mercado for the extensive research and discoveries he made there. The park is home to more than 130 species of mammals, including a population of black jaguars, 620 species of birds, and 70 species of reptiles, among them the black caiman. For Cindy, it was an opportunity not to be missed, and she was willing to put up with my impending foul disposition to see it.
The main draw is the Caparú Plateau, an 1,800-foot sandstone mesa that rises ominously out of the surrounding rainforest. The plateau was "discovered" by the British explorer Percy Fawcett in 1910, and it's said his descriptions of the place inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to write "The Lost World." The area is so remote, and getting there so difficult, that only a few hundred people visit each year. With the signatures of Cindy, myself, our guide, and our cook (our real guide) in the register at the park entrance, we brought that number to a whopping 192, and the new year was close at hand.
We'd been told we could book a tour out of the eastern Bolivian capital, Santa Cruz de la Sierra. With a population of over 1.5 million, it's the largest city in Bolivia, and somewhat less than what I'd call charming. Oil refining is the city's main industry, and outside of its version of Carnival, tourists mostly pass through on their way to somewhere else. Unlike the frivolity of most other South American Carnival celebrations, the oil-mad citizens of Santa Cruz spend their Carnival days shooting ink-filled water pistols at each other, a sport for young and old alike, who find great joy in blasting away at an unwary visitor. Thankfully, we missed it.
The day before leaving La Paz, we scouted the bus station and bought our tickets. Like most buses we'd encountered in four months of travel, they were small, cramped, and noisy. Twenty-two hours of my personal version of hell later, we arrived. Our first task was finding a place to sleep. Our guidebook pointed us to a hotel with an open courtyard and small, clean rooms. The courtyard was home to a flock of pet toucans with a nasty habit of crapping everywhere: the floors, the tables, the chairs, the hammocks, the walls (don't ask me how). Our new refuge was toucan-shit heaven.
The hostel gave us the number of a nearby tour agency, and after settling in and scraping the dung off our shoes, that became our next stop. They had no idea what to do with us. It was December, nowhere close to tourist season, and there were no scheduled tours we could join to split the cost. We were traveling on the cheap, and the main way tourists reached the park was by small plane, an idea we briefly considered before the price ruled it out. So they'd have to build a tour around us, to fit our time and our budget. After some bargaining, it was settled: we'd get an English-speaking guide and a cook, who would take us by Jeep to the plateau. To keep costs down, we'd have to make our own way to the small town of Carmen Ruiz, where we'd meet our guides at the only hotel in town.
Buses ran the route daily, and we could stop along the way at the old Jesuit mission town of Concepción. In the late 1600s and early 1700s, priests from the Society of Jesus pushed into the South American interior, into what is now Bolivia, Paraguay, and Brazil, to bring Roman Catholicism to the indigenous peoples of the region. The Jesuits taught farming, architecture, and the arts, and because the area was so remote, they worked almost entirely outside Spanish and Portuguese control. Over roughly 150 years, small cities grew up around their missions. By the early 1700s, this independence had finally drawn the attention of Spain and Portugal, who, fearing the Jesuits were becoming too powerful, expelled them and let the missions fall or be destroyed. Few of the great churches from that era survive. The one in Concepción is an exception, and we spent hours wandering the grounds, amazed at how well the settlement and church had been preserved. At one point, the sound of music led us to a small classroom off the main courtyard. We peeked in and were waved inside to listen to a violin sonata, performed beautifully by a ten-year-old local boy. It was one of the unexpected, enchanting joys of unscripted travel: the priests were long gone, but their legacy of arts and music still thrived among the locals.
Six hours later, Carmen Ruiz came into view: a typical charming Bolivian town, with dirt roads, spurious electricity, decent and hospitable people, and, like every remote backwater we've found anywhere in the world, an internet café off the plaza. We checked into our hotel, met our guides, and got some sleep before setting off early the next morning for Florida. I had no idea I was just hours from having every filling in my head shaken loose by the worst road I'd ever traveled. It was a seldom-used dirt track full of potholes big enough to swallow the Jeep, laced with washboard ridges and smaller holes ingeniously spaced to bounce me out of my seat and slam my head into the roof hard enough to raise the possibility of a concussion. My body still felt like it was vibrating hours after we stopped. Let's just say brightness and sunshine were not the words I'd use to describe my mood after that ordeal. And there was always the nagging thought in the back of my mind: I get to do this again on the way back. Yippee.
Mood somewhat restored by the King of Beers' cousin, we took a walk around town. Florida is a sleepy subsistence-farming village on the banks of the Paraguay River. They're not used to tourists, and there wasn't much to see, so we whiled away the afternoon paddling a dugout canoe up the river. By nightfall we were tired, well fed, and I was starting to feel better about the next day. That night we slept in the back room of an enormous thatch-roofed longhouse. I was just drifting off when I felt what I thought was water dripping from the ceiling. It wasn't water. It was bat shit. There were bats roosting in the eaves above us, and we were directly in their line of fire. We MacGyvered a canopy out of extension cords and spare bedding and finally drifted off to sleep, protected from the drizzle by the faded outline of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles above our heads.
The next morning we said goodbye to our hosts and continued on toward the plateau. Dominga waddled out to the compound fence and squawked farewell. Or maybe it was "give me your hand" again. I had an urge to throw a rock at him. Almost immediately we hit our first real obstacle: crossing the Paraguay River. The road dead-ended at the bank, and it was about 45 meters to the other side. There was no bridge, but there was a makeshift ferry. Thick planks of the densest, heaviest wood I've ever encountered were laid precariously between the ferry and the shore to form a ramp, and the Jeep was coaxed up and onto the deck. We used long poles to push the ferry across. I suspect that if the ferry had been on the far bank when we arrived, we'd have had to swim across and pole it back ourselves. In short order we were across and moving again, only to be stopped when the road turned to impassable mud. We found wooden planks along the roadside and stood them on end to build a path through the bog, moving the back planks to the front as we crossed them, inching forward until we cleared it.
The rest of the drive was uneventful, and that night we camped in the middle of a seldom-used airstrip in a large clearing. It was a beautiful evening, macaws flying overhead in pairs, the jungle gurgling just beyond the tree line. The next morning, just after breakfast, we were attacked by a swarm of bees. The cook dove into the truck as a panicked Marco waved us toward the cab of the now-moving vehicle. Swatting at the horde, he flung the last of our belongings into the pickup bed and threw himself in after them, and we roared away from the airfield. Marco took the brunt of the attack, picking up multiple stings, while I somehow came away unscathed and, for the first time on this trip, was finally starting to have a good time. Who needs coffee when your morning starts with this much adrenaline?
Days passed in rapid succession. We camped in the jungle at the end of an overgrown dirt road to nowhere. One night we set out walking with a high-powered flashlight to see what the light would draw out of the dark. We'd stop in the middle of the road, switch it on for a few seconds, then wait in the oily blackness to see if anything came toward us. Our patience was rewarded with a visit from a curious ocelot, which approached slowly, studied us for a while, decided we weren't the interesting snack it had hoped for, and wandered off.
A curious ocelot paid us a visit one night; a few days later, this waterfall-fed lagoon.
The days that followed were long, sweaty treks through steamy, dense jungle, and swims in a waterfall-fed lagoon at the base of the plateau. In the tent, naked and laughing, we minutely examined every crevasse of each other looking for ticks (thirteen in all, between the two of us). We were ambushed by a horde of moths while eating, and dealt with the occasional reminder that we were in the middle of nowhere. Near our campsite by a meandering river, Cindy disappeared around a bend to answer nature's call. As near as I can tell, something tickled her fancy mid-squat, because she shot several feet straight up in the air with an unexpected yelp. Marco, a few feet away from me and wearing a ridiculous hat draped in mosquito netting, looked up, entirely unconcerned, and deadpanned, "I think you should go see if Cindy is OK."
We never got to see much of the top of the plateau. From our camp it was a three-hour hike to the base, then another hour's climb to the summit. We reached the top just in time to watch the sunset from the rim, with no time left to explore. In my mind's eye it's still a place of mystery, filled with prehistoric animals and wars between local people and ape-like creatures. I guess I'll never know. The hike back was long, dark, and sweaty, and I already knew a long, irritating journey back to civilization was waiting for me. Crankiness was already setting in.
