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A fragile ebb and flow
By WILLIAM ECENBARGER CUIABA, Brazil -- The 1974 Ford pickup slithers and fishtails down the muddy road under the guidance of Albuquerque Nunes, who steers around ruts and craters. He slows for a bridge, which consists of two splintered planks spanning a pool astir with piranhas. Carefully lining up the truck wheels with the planks, Nunes downshifts and rides the wooden tracks to the other side. "The best way to cross these bridges is to not think too much," he says, with a flicker of a smile. The road bisects an endless parched landscape of beige and brown, broken only by an occasional palm or eucalyptus tree. Then we come upon an astonishing sight: Lying on the bank of a lagoon are hundreds of alligatorlike caimans. Many as long as 6 feet, the reptiles are piled three and four deep atop each other, jaws agape, awaiting their next instinct. A few others are floating in the water with only the bumps of their eyes showing. After riding a few more miles, so many spectacles have been seen that they have become less amazing, though never ordinary, for this is the Pantanal, the world's largest wetland. It is abotu two-thirds the size of Florida, sprawling over an estimated 39,000 square miles of southwestern Brazil and small parts of Bolivia and Paraguay, in the center of South America.
Here nature stands on its tiptoes. The Pantanal is home to 652 species of birds, 264 species of fish, 102 species of mammals and 177 species of reptiles (including an estimated 10-million caimans). The Pantanal also is probably the least known of the world's great natural wonders. When you arrive, you set your watch back about 100 years. Ox carts still transport goods. Cowboys still ride the range. People still live by the day, not the hour. When Nunes bought his truck, he paid for it in gold. "The owner didn't trust paper money," he says. "A lot of people out here don't." Suddenly he slams on the brakes, reverses about 20 yards and points to a tree with deep gouges in its trunk. "A jaguar sharpening his claws," he says. What looks to be a family of 100-pound guinea pigs lumbers down to one of the pools for a drink. They are capybaras, the world's largest rodent. Nunes points to the other side of the road, where 16 feet of yellow anaconda lies in shallow water. A 3-foot-tall Jabiru stork, the symbol of the Pantanal, wades into a lagoon on long stick legs, snaps a wriggling frog out of the muck and swallows it whole. My eyes scoop up these scenes greedily. We are on the only public road in the Pantanal, the Transpantaneira Highway, a 90-mile ribbon of red dirt and 114 precarious plank bridges. Engineers created it by building it about 12 feet above the surrounding terrain, to keep it dry during the rainy season. To achieve the elevation, the road-builders used soil from along the highway, leaving big rectangular trenches filled with water and fish that attract other animals in great abundance. As a result, the Transpantaneira Highway may offer the greatest wildlife show on earth.
But hurry. It may soon be over. A mile farther down the road, three ostrichlike rheas, strutting and vaguely comic, cross in front of the truck. The rheas, the largest birds in the Pantanal, are virtually extinct in most of Brazil because they feed on agricultural crops and so are killed by farmers. But rheas are a common sight in the Pantanal, where the major enterprise is cattle ranching. For two centuries, the rheas and the rest of the animals have existed in relative harmony with the ranchers. Now this way of life and the Pantanal itself are in peril. And the ranchers have turned to an unlikely savior: tourists. Generations of cowboysPaulo Cesar Ledovino Marconde rides up in a clatter of hooves and a cloud of red dust. Behind him a herd of gray cattle with massive humps grazes listlessly. These are zebu cattle, brought from India because of their ability to adjust to the heat, which can reach 115 degrees in the summer. Marconde wears boots, jeans, chaps, a broad-brimmed straw hat and a purple shirt damp with honest sweat. He dismounts, tethers his horse to a skinny tree and pulls a worn leather bag from his saddle. From it he extracts a spoon, two small jars and a cup. Carefully, he places in the cup four teaspoons of sugar and one teaspoon of guarana, the caffeine-rich Amazon fruit that is ground into powder and taken several times a day as a pick-me-up by many Brazilians. Marconde stirs the concoction vigorously and chugs it down in one gulp. Then he pounds his chest triumphantly and breaks into a 300-watt smile. Like this father, his grandfather, his great-grandfather and his great-great-grandfather, Marconde is a campaneiro, a cowboy. His chocolate skin tells of more-distant ancestors who were Africans brought over as slaves by the Portuguese to work in the gold mines. For the past 27 years, since he was 12, Marconde has labored from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. with a break for lunch. He works for 30 days and then gets four days off to be with his wife and son. His wages are $100 a month. Marconde does not want his 9-year-old son to continue the family's cowboy tradition. "He is going to school, and that is the door to a better life," he says. "I have a hard life, and there is no future. The ranches are shrinking, and the cattle are disappearing."
The cowboys have always been the economic backbone of the Pantanal, moving cattle from place to place to adapt to the ever-changing topography. What gives the Pantanal its special character is the dramatic annual cycle of massive flooding followed by receding water. Rain begins in October and continues through April, leaving about 80 percent of the land underwater. Dry plains of grass become an inland sea, and fish feed where deer browsed a few months before. The animals seek higher ground until April, when the waters begin receding and leaving behind pools of trapped fish that are a feast for the returning animals. Adding to the bounty, exuberant vegetation sprouts in the rich nutritive soil. The Pantanal is a kind of huge sponge that collects water spilling out of the Paraguay River and then slowly releases it back to the river. The ebb and flow is constant but slow. Neither plants nor animals are overwhelmed by too much or too little water. Humans: an endangered speciesJoao Alves de Campos started working as a cowboy at the age of 11, but after he married at 15 and quickly had two children, he found he could make much more money working in a gold mine. Today Campos, 39, tucks his sinewy body inside an old automobile tire and is lowered by a motorized winch about 100 feet into a narrow shaft. At the bottom, he crawls into one of a dozen dusty tunnels running perpendicular from the main shaft.
His is one of the most hazardous jobs in the world. He will stay down in the darkness for eight hours, often lying on his back, chipping away at the rock with a pick. Every 20 minutes or so he sends the results of his work to the surface in a wooden box, where it is milled to separate out the gold. Temperatures in the tunnels get as high as 105 degrees. Campos is paid a tiny percentage of the value of the gold he sends up, and his monthly earnings average $240. There is no health or life insurance, and the threat of a cave-in or explosion is constant. Campos is one of about 450,000 people who live in the Pantanal, mostly on the ranches or in small communities along the riverbanks. Pantaneiros, as they call themselves, are a proud group skilled at day-to-day living with the extremes of flood and drought. Like other species in the Pantanal, the Pantaneiros are endangered. Health services are inadequate, the schools are poor, and good job opportunities are few. What does offer them hope is development, but that puts the natural wonder of the Pantanal in danger the most. With more intensive cattle ranching has come the clearing of scarce forested land. Gold-mining fouls the water with mercury used in the processing. Chemical runoff from farming causes sediment to build up in the water. By far the biggest threat is a proposal for a 2,175-mile inland waterway called Hidrovia that would expand navigation in the Paraguay River by deepening the channel, removing rocks and straightening curves. Planners say the channel would boost exports from the South American interior and give the region, including the Pantanal, an economic lift. But opponents, including international environmentalists and many Pantaneiros, fear that the project will upset the delicate balance between the flooding and dry seasons, and turn vast areas of the Pantanal into year-round deserts. "A place like this may disappear as we know it because the fish won't reproduce, the birds that survive on the fish will also disappear from this area, and eventually everything goes away," says Reinaldo Lourival, a Brazilian representative of Conservation International. For now, Nature still has the upper hand. The Brazilian government declared in 1999 that it will not allow improvements in the river that might endanger the Pantanal. But powerful industrial concerns continue to press for the waterway. Among the Pantaneiros opposed to Hidrovia is Jose Tocqueville de Carvalho Neto, who represents a third generation of Pantanal ranchers. He owns the Fazenda Campo Neto, which is in the middle of the Pantanal and a 13-hour drive from the nearest town. "When my wife's grandfather came here in 1880, the ranches were so big, they were measured in square miles" rather than acres, he says. "They needed all that land because of the flooding. It takes three hectares (almost 7.5 acres) just to raise one cow. It didn't matter back then because the ranches were so large. But as the land was passed down to the next generation and subdivided among the sons, the ranches became smaller and less efficient. "This ranch started out at 240,000 hectares (about 593,000 acres). Today it's only 5,000" hectares, about, 12,355 acres. In 1997, Neto added 12 rooms to his Portuguese Colonial farmhouse and opened the Pousada Ecopan Tourist Lodge. The tourists provide Neto with money to meet his day-to-day expenses and enable him to continue to operate the ranch. His guests are integrated into ranch life, driving cattle and milking cows, and twice a day he takes them on drives to look for animals. There are safaris by foot, horseback and off-road vehicle. The rooms are luxurious by Pantanal standards -- clean and large, with private bathrooms and air conditioning. Ecopan Lodge is a destination for the traveler who is tired of the world's roped-off show places and ready for an authentic experience.
The lodge is a manifestation of ecotourism, the low-impact tourism intended to protect the environment while bringing economic benefits. Worldwide, the jury is still out on the idea of ecotourism, and the Pantanal has become a testing ground. The Pantanal has about 500 tourist facilities, most of them small and locally owned. But some problems are persistent. The area lacks trained guides, transportation is difficult and the Pantanal is little known outside Brazil. "The cattle are still the No. 1 thing for me. It roots me to the land," Neto says. "I have partnership with this land. But today the preservation of the flora and fauna of the Pantanal, as well as the ranching, depends on tourism." He is interrupted by a cacophony of trilling, warbling, gurgling, whistling and chattering. He points excitedly to a tall bocaiuva tree, which is filled with magnificent dark blue birds, perhaps 3 feet tall, with dashes of yellow around their beaks and eyes. They are hyacinth macaws, the largest member of the parrot family and worth $10,000 each on the black market. Because of their extraordinary beauty, the macaws are a critically endangered species and extinct in most of the rest of the world. But here they munch on palm nuts, their favorite food, which they crack with their powerful beaks. Nature's rush hour
I shade my eyes with one hand to scan the limbs and branches, but I don't see it until it flies off with a dozen smaller birds in hot pursuit. "Toucans feed on the eggs and nestlings of other birds," she says. "They make a lot of enemies that way." Coelho first saw the Pantanal from atop a horse at the age of 2 months, when her father took her for a tour of the family's 37,000-acre ranch. She began riding alone at 3 years, and now, 20 years later, she maneuvers her horse confidently through a cattle herd, calling to the cattle gently, "Hoat, hoat, hoat." She wears the khaki uniform of a guide. A roseate spoonbill feather is tucked in her straw hat, and a cellular telephone dangles from her belt. She is a "caimaner," a guide at the Caiman Ecological Refuge. This is a working cattle ranch at the southern border of the Pantanal that broke centuries of tradition in 1987 and opened the first ecotourism facility. "I have discovered what I want to do with my life," says Coelho, a recent college graduate with a degree in tourism. "Ecotourism must succeed here. We cannot let this land and its wildlife die. "The Pantanal is very lucky because it was unknown for so long and remained untouched. Now there is much more awareness of the need to preserve the environment. Some people want cattle raising; other people want tourism. We have to find a way to have both." We ride over desertlike sand that is strewn with crab and snail shells left from last year's flooding, past yellowing, spindly plants patiently awaiting the rain. My horse steps on a twig, and the sound sends a hundred or more birds flying off in one motion. The sun is dropping rapidly on the horizon, and nature's rush hour has begun. Parakeets and toucans wheel in the sky just above howler monkeys scurrying through the treetops. Beady-eyed marsh deer drink from a shallow pond. Bird songs fly from the trees like sparks from an anvil. On the ground, tiny life is everywhere, creeping, slinking, burrowing, slithering. The bright orange sun drops below the horizon and jerks the world into dusk, then darkness. The inky sky becomes carbonated with bright stars, undimmed by any city's glow, each star giving off light that has been on its way to this moment for a thousand years. From the darkness comes a deep bass growl, followed by a screech of pain. Thousands of these life and death dramas will be played out tonight, just as they have for eons. Mercy is not the way of the Pantanal. The strong really do eat the weak, and the Pantanal is not for the faint-hearted. But for those willing to take the time and the trouble, it is a journey through creation. But hurry. -- William Ecenbarger is a freelance writer who lives in Lancaster, Pa. If you go
TOUR OPERATORS: Guide services operate in the large cities nearest the Pantanal. But there are reports of unscrupulous operators who meet the arriving travelers, promise complete tours, then once they have the fees, turn the foreigners over to locals who may speak no English and who do not deliver what was promised. The best advice is that if you want to see the Pantanal but do not want to buy a package tour from a North American firm, check with other travelers and consult such online chat rooms as Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree. You can post a request for information on reputable guides. Among North American companies offering packaged trips to the Pantanal are: Ladatco, 3006 Aviation Ave., No. 4C, Coconut Grove, FL 33133; www.ladatco.com/index.htm. Both companies use the Caiman Ecological Refuge; information in English on the Refuge is available at www.ladatco.com.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
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From the Times Travel page
From the AP |
GETTING THERE: The Pantanal is fairly remote from large cities. However, towns with airports are on its the edges. Have a travel agent figure your flights from Miami to Corumba, Cuiaba or Campo Grande. Most of the ecotourism lodges offer transfers from these towns. For the names of some lodges, consult guidebooks such as the authoritative South American Handbook, Lonely Planet Brazil or Fodor's Brazil.
