Insight Guides: South America by Insight Guides

Author:Insight Guides
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel, South America
Publisher: APA
Published: 2013-08-27T04:00:00+00:00

The Pantanal wetland, home to an astonishing faunal diversity.

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Rondônia: Brazil’s Wild West

If you thought the days of the Wild West were over, consider Rondônia. At the beginning of the 1970s this Brazilian state was a tree-tangled wilderness on the southern flank of the Amazon jungle, bordering Bolivia. It was home to just a few thousand hardy rubber tappers. Today, settlers have pushed their way pell-mell into almost every corner of Rondônia, hacking down the jungle and frequently enforcing their land claims with the squeeze of a trigger. In the 1980s, nearly a quarter of the Rondônian rainforest was destroyed, mostly by burning, to clear land for planting and cattle pastures. In the dry season, from May to October, a blanket of smoke hangs over the state as forests are incinerated.

With the extension of roadway BR 364 from São Paulo to the capital of Rondônia, the river port of Porto Velho £ [map], express buses carry peasant migrants directly to the new frontier. A ride up the highway in one of the local buses provides a revealing view both of frontier life and of rainforest devastation. The road northwest is now paved through Peru and southeast all the way to the Atlantic.

Rubber tapping has been all but abandoned in Rondônia as the trees have disappeared, despite laws enacted for their protection. Some 300,000 Brazilians still survive collecting the fruits of the forest – wild rubber, Brazil nuts, and resin. They now live mostly in the state of Acre, west of Rondônia on the borders of Bolivia and Peru. Key to their survival are their isolation and international pressures to protect their benign coexistence with the rainforest. Some protected areas, called extractive reserves, have been established for these jungle harvesters. But as Brazil’s population continues to grow faster than new jobs are available, the pressures to clear the forest that have transformed Rondônia are likely to keep moving westward.

The Pantanal: bird paradise

An enormous wetland called the Pantanal is perhaps the most exquisite gallery of all for observing Brazilian fauna. Comprising 210,000 sq km (81,000 sq miles) of seasonally flooded swampland east of the Paraguay River on Brazil’s western border with Bolivia, the Pantanal is home to more than 650 species of birds, 400 kinds of fish, and an abundance of reptiles and animals as well as 3,500 species of plants. There are white ibises, egrets, blue herons, green parakeets, pheasants, and the 2-meter (7ft) tall white jabirú or tuiuiú stork.

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