In Bolivia, a Village With Real Staying Power

Among the giant ferns, you feel you're on another planet. I bounced along on the spongy mosses under a multi-story canopy dotted with purple and phosphorescent pink orchids and bromeliads. The gnarled fern trees are 600 to 700 years old, and I half expected a mastodon to charge by. Our group's guide, 25-year-old Fidel, explained that the foliage grows gradually because clouds blanket the area year-round, keeping everything damp and dimly lit.

Fidel pointed to jaguar tracks -- fresh in the mud -- and indicated the start of a three-day footpath to the San Rafael River and Devil's Tooth mountain, an area chock-full of immense condors and the Andean speckled bear.

These types of community-based eco-tourism initiatives are enough to make President Morales proud. His new economic plan calls for a hundred such ventures. "Broad-based growth," wonkishly put, as opposed to growth concentrated in the hands of a few large soy, oil, timber and mining tycoons, as is now the order of the day in Bolivia.

The idea is to turn Bolivia's exceptionally wild beauty into cash. The country has been declared one of the world's select 10 "megadiverse" nations out of appreciation for its dense mountains, compact valleys, yawning salt flats and low-lying tropical forests, and the variety of species inhabiting them. The single park of Amboro, for example, contains more biodiversity than all of Costa Rica.

Quechuas like Fidel can only do so much to fulfill this eco-egalitarian dream, because they speak only Spanish (in addition to Quechua). Morales's government knows that expatriates -- precisely the motley bunch living in Samaipata -- are indispensable to attract visitors who no habla español or whose passion for bird-watching requires local guides with special expertise.

Take Michael Blendinger, a trilingual Argentine ornithologist whom we passed on the trail. Leading a group of Canadian aficionados, he stopped to greet Fidel and me. His Samaipata-based agency brings business to La Yunga, and Fidel and the locals love him for it.

But Blendinger, Fidel and I discussed a growing threat: Land-hungry settlers from Bolivia's interior are slashing and burning their way toward the giant ferns to plant corn and raise cattle. Central government eco-plans can do little to stop them unless the economics work: The dollar value of the landscape for tourism has to outweigh its value for agriculture.

As the advancing settlers organize their slash-and-burn forays, the only credible counterforce comes from a dozen communities benefiting from ecotourism around the park, who, with the help of their expat allies, pressure local government to use policy and force to hold back the new settlers.

"If it pays, it stays," Blendinger said, referring to the tree ferns. "If not, this is charcoal."

Welcome to the Jungle

The relationship between locals and expats in Samaipata runs deeper than quid pro quo.

I found myself relaxing one evening in Samaipata's answer to the Hard Rock Cafe, a bar called Mosquito, beside Georg, the German owner of the Landhaus Hotel. Decades back, Georg settled here and proceeded to take in about 10 hard-to-adopt children from several Bolivian orphanages.

One of them, Juan, is now an adult who tends bar at Mosquito. He has the dark skin and double-folded eyelids of a Quechua. Juan handed me a cold Huari before scooting over to a table to schmooze with some travelers.