Our Italian team has completed their expedition to Noel Kempff Mercado National Park located in the southern part of the country. The expedition commenced its routing from La Paz going eastwards to the province of Santa Cruz de la Sierra with destination to the village of La Florida inside the Noel Kempff Mercado Park. In a recent correspondence we had with Mirko, one of the expedition members, we were given the following description of their routing:

"The Noell Kempff Mercado National Park was even wilder than we expected. It is an area that consists of 100,000,000 km of forests, lakes, savannah and rivers and only its 2-3% is explored so far, something that makes it really incredible nowadays. We have paddled down  for 15 days the Rio Paraguà, a river that marks the western border of the park, from the little community of La Florida that we reached after two days of a dirty road in the forest that is possible to drive trough only for specific months during the year as in wet times it's quite impossible to reach the  park by land."

And Mirko continued his description,

"This is the situation we found when we arrived there. The whole park is managed by four or five rangers, and since the end of the rubber period the Rio Paraguà has been explored in its part from Florida to Porvenir only by a biological expedition in wet times, and the other part, from Porvenir to Piso Firme is "better" known (in the relative possible meaning of the word better); this has been a really dry rainy season and by the morphology of the river it was really possible for it to be interrupted in some spots, but due to the fact that anyone had explored the river in this season it was impossible to have any kind of information about how many spots and how long would they be.

Due to all this it was clear that the aim of our expedition would have become to explore the river for how long it would be possible and to track the animal sightings for how much our skills would have permitted it.  

The only person that could help us was Don Carlo, an old caimanero that worked on the Paraguà and that even if he knew the river only as far as three days from Florida, he was very skilled in how to move on it (the river hasn't had a definite course because of the many lakes that passes through) and he also knew everything about animals and environment.

So we started from La Florida with two canoes and the lightest equipment we could afford and we faced many difficulties to proceed.

Mirko continued his description of the local area and its abiding animals...

The river was interrupted in many spots by floating bunches of weed that were very difficult to pass and really dangerous too, in fact to carry the canoes over it we were forced to descent and pull  over some floating wooden poles that we get from the forest; the problem with staying in the water until our breast was that this kind of weed is the typical nest of the sucuruku (the Anaconda), of many kind of  spiders and of the petos (a very powerful killer bee that attack his enemies into the eyes) without talking of the many caimans that were present. We proceeded this way, sometimes bypassing the tortas (the weeds) forcing our way through the forest when they were too long and dangerous.

Don Carlo was a really good travel companion and taught us a lot of things about living in the forest and about the animals abiding in the area, animals that we met (without talking of the incredible number of birds species) as giant otters, capybaras, caimans, river dolphins and lots lots of insects from spiders to unbelievably big and evil ants, he taught us which one of them (almost all ) were dangerous and it was clear that the Anaconda was the most dangerous as if it always attacks and the even if it's not big enough to eat you it will pull you down below the weed leaving you die there by lack of air as the weed is too thick and heavy to pull over.

So after 15 days of harsh life, we arrived in a section of the river that was nearly impossible to pass due to the fact that after a two day recognition expedition we couldn't even see the river. It was all a huge torta (weed) which was shared by the main course of the river and by its many lakes, so, as we couldn't have enough time left to proceed (remember the we were in non sponsored expedition so funds and time were limited) we had to start our return when we were only at 25km from Porvenir.

Even if we couldn't cover the whole course, we had already covered its 75%, meaning that we went where not even the people that were born in this zone have ever seen the place and we collected a good photographic report of the environment and the animals and we had a really great experience of harsh life in the wilderness so we can consider our expedition very successful.

Using this way, we had a little time left to climb the Serrania de Huanchaca (The Huanchaca mountain range) from Los Fierros and it was really an incredible ascend with a six hours climbing having a weight of 25kgs on our back but it was really worth.

The sunset was incredible and we really felt to be in a lost world, besides, we were near the Ricardo Franco Hills where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle inspired his classic "Lost World" after he had been directed to this area by Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett.

After a two days permanence there we descended, and we had the luck of seeing the Cateracta el Incanto by night with the full Moon and Mars as it has never been so close, such a feeling that we felt only in the Salar de Uyuni last year."

Mirko Molinari, expedition member

The Great Web of Percy Harrison Fawcett

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