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<text> <title> (Jun. 17, 1991) Taking a Guided Tour Through Eden </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1991 June 17, 1991 The Gift Of Life </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> ENVIRONMENT, Page 80 Taking a Guided Tour Through Eden </hdr> <body> 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 biomedical 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. </body> </article> </text>