Bolivia's Lodge for Nature.

• Author: Ceaser, Mike
• Position: Madidi National Park - Brief Article

WHEN BOLIVIA'S MADIDI National Park was created in 1995, in the northwestern part of the country near the Peruvian border, many of those living in and around it were opposed because they feared that the accompanying restrictions on hunting, fishing, and logging would reduce their incomes. But the residents of the indigenous community of San Jose de Uchupiamonas also saw opportunity.

Years before, the Tacana/Quechua indigenous community had attempted alone to establish an ecotourism lodge along the Tuichi River within the park, but their solo effort was only partly successful. However, with the park's creation in 1995, community leaders approached Conservation International (CI), one of the proponents of the park's creation, for assistance. CI contributed US$200,000 to the project and helped obtain another $1.25 million from the Inter-American Development Bank.

Five years later, Chalalan Lodge, one of the few such ecolodges owned and managed by local indigenous people, has become a star attraction in the Bolivian tropics. Built on the edge of Chalalan Lake, a twenty-minute walk from the Tuichi River, Chalalan Lodge has the capacity for fourteen visitors, although a modest expansion is in the works. The lodge is reached by a five-hour boat ride upstream from the town of Rurrenabaque, made famous by Israeli tourist Yossi Ghinsberg, who in 1982 got lost in the area's jungles and survived to write a best-selling book about his adventures (Back from Tuichi: The Harrowing Life-and-Death Story of Survival in the Amazon Rain Forest). Ghinsberg later returned and assisted the people of San Jose, called "Josesanos," in making contacts with international organizations to help and even got married on Lake Chalalan's dock.

Chalalan Lodge opened in 1997 and has received an increasing number of visitors who are a mix of young backpackers and senior citizens with an occasional well-known guest such as Joachim, the prince of Denmark. The visitors swim or row on Lake Chalalan, from where monkeys can be observed at dawn and dusk, or walk along the lodge's nearly twenty miles of trails trying to spot some of the area's nine species of parrots and five species of monkeys. The lodge is set in primary jungle thick with palms, ferns, vines, and such oddities as the mapajo tree, with its huge buttresses and two-inch-long solitary ants. In addition, six species of cat inhabit the area, as do deer, peccaries, tapirs, and caimans.

The four-and-a-haft million-acre...