Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The rest were little more than half-naked sprigs sticking out of the ground. This was their
forest? “We have had some difficulties in growing the trees,” he said. “But we take very
good care of them.”
He stood there with his hands on his hips, and we stared. Here, in the heart of the
Amazon, we had found the most pathetic nature preserve in the entire universe.
“It's small,” the plant manager said. “But it's symbolic of our commitment to preserving
the forest.”
At kilometer 77 on BR-163, Rick's rental car turned onto a side road. Mango followed,
guiding our car off the pavement and onto dirt. We turned east, leaving the Tapajós
National Forest at our backs. A wooden sign with hand-painted letters stood on the high-
way shoulder:
VENDE-SE
766 HaDE
MATA VIRGEM
4km—>
“For sale…Damn, I wish I had some money!” Gil said, watching the sign go by. “Shit,
I love
forests!
”
We were driving to Rick's rainforest. At long last, we were going to find out what he
meant by
goofing around.
Adam and I each had our own worst-case scenario, and they both
involved kidnapping.
Two kilometers in, and the fields and overgrowth on the right became a thick secondary
forest—the dense growth that floods into a previously disturbed area. Because secondary
forest lacks the shady canopy of untouched, primary forest, it often grows with a thicket-
like abandon absent in primary forest.
Or as Gil put it, “Shit, look at this fucking forest! That's a
serious forest.
”
Rick's land was taken care of by a young man named Antonio, who had been born and
raised on an adjacent small farm. Antonio's family home was a long, single-story cabin
made with rough-hewn planks of itauba wood. It sat on a low rise bordered by trees. Chil-
dren scurried and played in the yard. There were chickens, and a well, and an outdoor kit-
chen where Antonio cut fruit for us with a machete. It seemed vaguely like paradise. Only
if you had been here thirty years could you understand that this was a landscape in the
throes of change.
