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.
borochi
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.
This is a story about getting there. The park itself, we didn't enter this time. That's for October. This was the reconnaissance: learn the road, meet the people, understand what the real journey will ask. What we found was that the getting there is its own country.
I've literally spent months in the weeds of this thing. Literature, permits, institutional history, maps, correspondence in two languages — the kind of detail work that makes you forget why you started. So, here's my account, and I'm sticking to it, before the trees close in again.
Two months ago I wrote about a photograph of a maned wolf. A male, collared, sitting in the grass at Los Fierros, identified only as M8. I said that finding him was reason enough to go.
There is a photograph at the front of Louise Emmons's monograph that I find I cannot stop returning to. This is what it has come to mean.