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Outside Magazine's 2002 Travel Guide

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International Parks
The Lost World: Found
Exploring the back of beyond in Bolivia's Parque Nacional Noel Kempff Mercado
By Elizabeth Royte

ON OUR FIRST DAY at camp, I sat in a small screened dining room, poking at the fly larvae wriggling through my fish. Next, a chicken foot appeared in the rice—a choice piece of meat if you like that kind of thing. Later, the screams of our guide would yank us from our rooms: He had been stung by eight wasps, now holding him captive 20 feet up a tower. Clearly, the rough edges of Parque Nacional Noel Kempff Mercado had yet to be smoothed.

Lying along Brazil's western flank, this 3.8-million-acre, Connecticut-size park sees fewer than 250 people a year. Low visitation means the place feels only marginally more explored today than when Colonel Percy Fawcett, the British naturalist, first explored it nearly 100 years ago. To get here, my companions—a tour operator from Seattle and a writer from Boulder—and I had opted against a 12-hour bus ride and sprung for a two-and-a-half-hour flight from the Bolivian city of Santa Cruz. During this flight, one gazes down—in wonder or horror, depending on one's cultural references—at hundreds of miles of unbroken rainforest canopy, a view that magnifies the unsettling feeling of having slipped, irretrievably, behind the back of beyond.

Hiking in such an undervisited park appealed to my misanthropic side: There'd be no enthusiasts on the trail asking if I'd spotted the razor-billed curassow. Wandering among some of the richest animal and plant diversity in the hemisphere appealed to my biophilic side. Last December, UNESCO designated the park a World Heritage Site, a seal of approval that puts it—in terms of scientific value—in the same league as the Great Barrier Reef, the Galapagos Islands, and 135 other sites worldwide. South America has 17 such sites, but in none of them, Tim Miller, our American guide who runs Neblina Forest Birding and Natural History Tours in Bolivia, assured us, can visitors see so much wildlife with so little effort. By day, we'd move by plane, boat, and truck; by night, we'd sleep at rustic camps. Backpackers are welcome at Noel Kempff, but their options are limited: The park has only 28 miles of marked trails and only 43 miles of dirt roads. Like most visitors, we planned to day hike from an interior camp, then fly north, go by boat to another camp, and then hike to the park's feature attraction—the 250-foot-high Arco Iris waterfall.

At camp one, Los Fierros, which consisted of a few screened dorms, a kitchen, and a dining room, we dumped our gear and hopped into a truck bed for a drive through the rainforest. The landscape obliterated any notion of Bolivia as the Tibet of South America. This was unadulterated Amazonian jungle, replete with high heat, high humidity, and high hymenoptera—ants, bees, and wasps that covered our clothing and packs at every static moment. We walked ahead of the truck to examine purple dragonflies of paleolithic proportions and the tracks of a maned wolf, a rare nocturnal creature. It was so hot, a white-tailed hawk was panting.

Several miles to the east loomed the park's defining physical feature, the imposing Huanchaca Plateau. Like a vast shoebox, it rises 1,800 feet above the surrounding plain. The 93-mile-long escarpment, comprised of steep-sided Precambrian sandstone, was first explored in 1910 by Percy Fawcett, whose accounts inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World in 1912.

Sixty-nine years after Fawcett's wanderings, the Bolivian government named the region a national park. It was expanded in 1988 and renamed for Noel Kempff Mercado, a Bolivian conservationist who was murdered in 1986 while exploring the Huanchaca Plateau. He had landed on a covert airstrip where Brazilians tended the world's largest cocaine factory. The coca processors gunned him down on the spot.

Protecting the unique fauna of the plateau and its surrounding forest and grasslands is crucial to the park's mission. The Brazilian state of Rondonia, notorious for clear-cutting and for slash-and-burn agriculture, flanks the park's northeastern edge: an 80-mile border with environmental disaster. Brazil's inability to enforce environmental law has made Noel Kempff—where poaching and logging are fairly well controlled—a last refuge for many species driven to extinction just a mile or two away.

Would we see any of those species? Tim had given us fair warning that the rainy season wasn't ideal for mammal sightings, yet we'd spot black spider monkeys and a tropical rodent called an agouti in the forest, and giant river otters, pink dolphins, capybaras, and brown capuchin monkeys along the waterways. Pastór, our local guide, would claim that a puma streaked in front of our truck, but the group decided he was hallucinating.

Tim tried to refocus my attention on birds, of which the park contains some 600 species. "Stand right here," he'd say, manhandling me into position and pointing toward far-off snags. "Follow that whitish branch to where it intersects at ninety degrees, go over two feet, and you've got a motmot."

He was right. And so I birded.

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