The Rainforest Future (Iwokrama, part 1)

The rainforest. I always wondered what it was like to be in the middle of that thick nowhere, the pure green heart of the jungle, crawling with creatures big and small and strange. It must make you feel like an anomaly and an anachronism, being a modern human being in a primeval world.

As a kid, I used to obsess about those cinematic adventurers in their safari khakis, sweat stains under their armpits, hacking their way through the jungle. How do they find their way? How many bugs bite them? What kind of sounds do they hear? Where do they go to the bathroom?

And then of course, the childhood fantasies of one day taking part in some mysterious, urgent rainforest expedition. Perhaps me as the hotshot anthropologist tracking a lost tribe (thanks, National Geographic!). Or me as the quirky cryptozoologist, on the trail of a dinosaur-like monster creature (er, thanks, Reader's Digest!). Or perhaps me as an international woman of mystery, hunting down a camp of evil terrorists (thanks, everything from MacGyver to Austin Powers).

But as I grew up, seeing as a career in either military intelligence or monster-hunting didn't really materialize, and growing more and more attached to indoor plumbing, I began to think that the rainforest thing would have to be just another one of those unlived fantasies.

One of the perks of being in South America, however, is being near some of the few remaining great rainforests in the world. And so the Lance Gibbs housemates (Cookee and me, Angela and Kristan) decided to take a long weekend to go to Iwokrama, in the center of Guyana, where a million acres of Amazon rainforest lives and thrives.

The very attentive of you will remember Iwokrama as grabbing international headlines (Time magazine's story here; CNN here; and the Telegraph here) earlier this year for being the first rainforest to be part of what could be an emerging market in ecological services. To sum up: in November 2007, Guyana President Bharrat Jagdeo went public with a proposal to place the Iwokrama rainforest under British control, acknowledging that the country had not the wherewithal to take care of this invaluable natural resource. Fast forward a few months later, and a company called Canopy Capital has decided to take Guyana up on that offer.

For us normal folk with no money to buy rainforest futures, a weekend at the Iwokrama Field Center is enough. The Iwokrama International Centre for Conservation and Development is much lauded for being able to balance sustainable use of the forest resources (and yes, that includes logging and tourism) and conservation. So it's not exactly the raw adventure I pictured as a child, but in this incarnation there are clean toilets. Yay!

We left the chaos of Georgetown at 10pm--and at this point, the less said about that grueling ride (12 hours, dirt roads, police station checks, bugs in the bus, aaaaargh) the better. But when I opened my eyes at 7am, marveling that my neck hadn't been broken, I awoke to the great beauty of the Guyana hinterlands, in a small village called Kurupukari, on the banks of the mighty Essequibo River.

And already it looked like a page out of National Geographic. A pair of red macaws were flying near the river crossing where we had to wait for the Iwokrama Centre's speedboat to pick us up. The ferry driver told us of cayman waiting in the swamp, along with anacondas, boas, jaguars. Piranhas in the water. And, oh, are you people going to Iwokrama Centre? It's very nice over there. Nobody's ever been eaten by a cayman.