12 CultureShock! Bolivia
foreign trekkers. Here rests the thriving city of Santa
Cruz, Bolivia’s other economic hub after La Paz with an
agro-industrial sector demanding autonomy for the region.
Within this vast territory of eastern and northern Bolivia also
lie the departments of Beni and Pando, where the melting
snows of the Andes have fi nally matured into full fl edged
rivers—piranha infested tributaries leading to the Amazon.
Bolivia’s tropical lowlands are a haven for people
whose professions end with ‘ologist.’ You’ll fi nd ecologists,
ethnologists, archaeologists, ornithologists, herbologists and
maybe even a tapirologist or a jaguarologist, some of them
encountering heretofore undiscovered endemic animal and
plant species. The preferred habitat of these ‘ologists’ is
in Bolivia’s vast and secluded national parks, set aside to
conserve rain and cloud forests and protect small populations
of original inhabitants and rising occasionally into a fourth
type of region.Within the tropical lowlands alone are numerous regions
and subregions, highlighted by the lowland rainforests (think
‘jungle’), the savannah (more grassy and seasonal than the
rainforest), and the Chaco, a hot dry land with occasional
cold fronts, where the Guarani people have learned to survive,
and deeper within, tapirs and jaguar roam.