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difficult his work had become in recent years. “The rains are
supposed to begin in November, but now it’s starting in August,”
Cabrera said. “Many of my animals died because of the heavy
storms. The grass was washed away. They couldn’t tolerate it.”
Cabrera lifted his arm to the peaks looming over us. “All of
these mountains were covered,” he said. “All the way to where
we are standing now. In 12 years, the glaciers have shrunk so
much. I’m scared we won’t have water in the future.” I trudged
through the mud to a tongue of snow and ice that was spilling
down from a high pass—a vestige of the glacier Cabrera had just
described. The ice crunched under my boots and the glacier let
off the sound of muffled rain as the meltwater fell away from
the mountain in a buried stream.
We rumbled over the ridge and into a bank of fog as we began
our descent. I’d developed a profound respect for what Leoncio
was able to do with that truck. I had spent years on rough dirt
roads in various parts of Africa, but I had never seen driving as
sure as this. Soon some small shrubs began to appear. And not
long after, trees. We emerged from the fog just as the sun slipped
out of reach beyond the Andes.A FEW DAYS LATER and several valleys to the north, I was in a
canoe downstream of Shintuya, on the Madre de Dios River. We
had left the cloud forest behind and were dropping down into the
rainforest of the Amazon Basin. The Madre de Dios was a broad
river by now, a few hundred yards across. On its left bank was
the thick of jungle of Manu National Park, a protected UNESCO
World Heritage site and the largest tropical wilderness left on
the planet. A large tapir fed on plants at the water’s edge, and
macaws flew in pairs high above us.
Suddenly, my guide sat bolt upright and pointed downstream.Rainforest treks might turn up nocturnal monkeys, which make their
homes in tree hollows. Opposite: Mónica Gornikiewicz, a collaborator
with the Soqtapata conservation area, hikes toward a waterfall on the
Saucipata River. Visitors can stay at the reserve in an open-air lodge.