When one arrives at the Amazonian National Park coming from the main road, an impressive panorama opens up from the scenic overlook right ahead: a wilderness of forest-covered hills. Below, runs the Tapajós River. At this time of the year it is full. Even so, stone tips can be seen jutting out of its surface agitating the blue waters of this old river that comes from the savannah-like region known as the cerrado in Brazil.

The Amazonian National Park is inhabited by some 425 species of birds and 103 species of mammals, according to the most recent surveys. Its surface area spreads over more than a million hectares between the state of Pará and the Amazon Rainforest, on the crossroads between the trans-Amazonian and BR-163 highways.

I was invited by Amiparna (Friends of the Amazonian National Park Association) to see the park, an NGO created with resources derived from Conservation International and managed by the inhabitants of Itaituba (PA).

Amiparna organized a visit with secondary education students of Itaituba, a city located at 65 km from the park. The majority had never been there before and some had never ever trekked through a forest, although they lived in the heart of the Amazon Rainforest.

Claudio Rodrigues is a student of a travel agency technical course. This was his second visit to the park. His first occurred a year before, during a field class of the course itself.

Claudio says that he’s not aware of anyone in Itaituba that frequents the forest for leisure. Local culture, says he, is more connected to the region’s river beaches – with a dash of beer and some honest-to-good fish fillets roasted over a coal fire.

A distant forest

I think to myself if these urban inhabitants of the Amazon rainforest have ever had the habit of wandering through the forest. I have sought clues in novels written by the region’s authors such as with the writings of Benedito Monteiros of Pará, but I have found no reference to such habits.

In the 19th century, writer Inglês de Souza did make a record of some decent childhood memories in the rural area of Óbidos (PA). While characters from Milton Hatoum’s book, “Dois Irmãos” (or Two Brothers), seem oblivious to the forest that isolates Manaus. In “Mad Maria”, by Marcio Souza, the forest is seen as an enemy to fight off. Only indigenous natives and riparian dwellers perceived the Amazon region as their home.

Maria Lucia dos Santos, president of Amiparna, can’t get over that fact. She knows that the forest ensures quality of life, but if “one doesn’t know the forest, one cannot preserve it”, she insists. A teacher of municipal schools, she uses the forest as a transversal theme in her classes.


Visualizar PARNA AMAZONIA em um mapa maior

Regeneration

Before beginning a walk, Amiparna guides endeavor to heighten the senses of these kids preparing them for what they will see on the way. “We do not need to actually meet any animals in order to know them better. By observing their tracks in the dirt, the leftovers of their meals and even feces, we glean enough information to introduce them, so to speak, to the students”, explains Edvilson Conceição, an instructor with Amiparna.

After about a half hour walk over a beaten track through the thick of the forest, we arrived at a hundred year old tree of the cedroarana variety, whose roots spread out like tentacles into the jungle. It is a remnant of the primary forest that dominated that region before machines came in to cut the trans-Amazonian highway.

With the building of the road back in the 70s, the jungle was much degraded. However, with the creation of the park it has been slowly recovering. Judging from the height of tree canopies and the width of their trunks (all of which are 40 years old) one can see the vitality the forest still has to heal itself.

According to biologists that study the region’s flora, this rapid growth may be favored by the water cycle of the Tapajós River. And also for the fact that the forest’s closed nature helps build a cloud layer and rainfall that increases the region’s water levels.

Back to camp, I decide to spend the night in the park. I set up my hammock on the scenic overlook while the evening closes around me, changing the color of the Tapajós riverbed. A cold wind coming from the river’s gutter begins to chill our bones. Not even mosquitoes bear such treatment.

The students leave. Only hired third-party watchmen remain in the park who, in the absence of environment analysts, attempt to control the coming and going of people from the unit – at least those that do so from the main entrance.

The unit’s head, Maria Lucia Carvalho, from the career list of the Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação da Biodiversidade (ICMBio - a Biodiversity Conservation Institute), acknowledges the poor conditions of the Parna. Her dream is to transform it into the region’s forest tourism drive.

But for now this is just a dream. With things as they stand, she prefers not to charge any entrance fee from the 400 or so visitors the park receives every year, almost all of which are researchers.

Self sacrificing, she bets on environmental compensation resources to improve her management. Since she took office, she has been waiting for some R$1.5 million in investments to be employed towards the region’s tourism infrastructure.

The problem is to implement all these improvements only to have the hydroelectric power plant flood it all. And that concern comes from the fact that one of the five dams of the Tapajós Complex, foreseen in PAC (Brazil’s new Growth Acceleration Program) will be built along those rapids, flooding part of the Amazonian National Park.

According to Maria Lucia, who had access to the power plant plans, aside from the natural areas, some 120 km of the trans-Amazonian highway will be flooded. “The current project means that this entire stretch or jungle traversing road will have to be rebuilt, between kilometers 53 and 165”, she warns.

A decisive moment Gilberto Nascimento Silva is a woodward of the Amazonian National Park. He is a hired third-party employee since 1993 that spends 15 days at home and 15 days within the forest. Originally from the state of Piauí, he moved to Pará in the early 90s following an adventurer uncle who claimed he would make a fortune with mining. One day that uncle came home and showed him a picture of those gigantic trees found in the park. That struck a chord and off he went, leaving everything behind to follow his uncle. They eventually settled in the township of Itaituba, in the vicinity of the higher Tapajós on west of Pará. Gilberto worked transporting gold, as a waiter, in the region’s hotels. But none of this was gratifying to him. One fine day he came got word of a job vacancy in the park. Even as a newcomer to firearms, he decided to take up the job. Forest life awakened in him a new passion: photography. Then, one day, an English photographer asked him where he could find spotted leopards. Gilberto replied that he used to see one on the curve of the road, at daybreak. At five in the morning of the following day, they were off. At the precise time, as if showing up to an arranged meeting, the leopard crossed the road. The photographer didn’t even get off the motorbike’s passenger seat. He simply steadied his camera on Gilberto’s shoulder, took a single photo and asked to leave. Never again did he hear of him. From that day, Gilberto also began to take pictures. “It seemed so easy that I could do it too”, he recalls with humor. Today he has a collection of hundreds of images of the park’s animals and plants. Gilberto is not really a knowledgeable photographer. What he learned came from other professionals who visited the park since. His advantage, though, lies in his knowledge of the forest’s habits. When he goes out to take pictures he hardly counts on luck. He heads straight to where he expects to find the object of his interest. “Each animal has its own time for this and that, food preferences, tree preferences and so on”, he explains. “The ararajuba, or Golden Parakeet for instance, can be found at dusk on murici or aninhagá trees”, says he. “There’s also a tree whose name no one knows that produces a little coconut that these birds enjoy very much. You will usually find their nests there”. In the Amazonian National Park these ararajubas can be seen in flocks of up to 50 individuals. When exposed to the late afternoon light, it is as if the whole tree were covered with yellow flowers. Meanwhile, the Red Maccaw enjoys the bacaba. “When it notices someone approaching it sounds a warning to others of its species. When that happens, it is best to back off and approach from another route”, states he. Gilberto admits that he has not yet taken that ace photo, but he will have enough time on his hands to continue to try, since he has already decided to spend the rest of his days living in the park. “It is really wonderful to live in this jungle”. To take that magical photo, he must be on the right track. Such as with the great masters of photography, Gilberto learned a secret, and that is patience, patience and yet more patience.

Luiz Motta is journalist and environmental educator. His work is focused on Amazonia, to where he already traveled several times, either to write for mainstream newspaper, doing investigations to Greenpeace or simply trying to create channels of communications between Brazil´s Ministry of Environment and local communities.