The rains came early, the road went under water, and the cameras came home in their cases. Notes from a week of turning back, and of laying the groundwork for 2027.
A breakfast that won the backing of Bolivia's lowland indigenous peoples, a dirt road we never reached, an old carver in Concepción, and a night in San Ignacio deciding what matters: it's easy to walk away from a borochi, not so easy to walk away from a community.
Two days into a camera-trap expedition for Bolivia's maned wolf, a sweltering afternoon with indigenous leaders in Trinidad turned the borochi from a destination into a door.
A photographer with a credit card and a WhatsApp thread becomes a node in Bolivia's informal supply chain — shipping tires by Thursday night bus to a park ranger who nurses a '97 Nissan Patrol three hours down a dirt road to keep a conservation expedition alive.
A permit coffee in La Paz became an afternoon with a birder who names every bird in Latin. Then a scientist who walked the savanna with Emmons. Then, over a birthday cake, the maned wolf turned out to be part of my wife’s family’s story all along.
Back in Bolivia for October: a letter signed somewhere over the Gulf, a memorial for a friend on the Isla del Sol, a message that changed my route into the park, and a whole community ready to carry the work in on its own shoulders.
What the Bolivian Navy is doing at the top of the world, and why divers should care.
Coroico, an old bridge, and the beginnings of something at Pongo Bella Vista.