A remote jungle lodge that only takes 20 guests

The Indigenous community-owned Chalalán Ecolodge offers family adventures and rare wildlife encounters in the Bolivian Amazon.

We heard the snorts first, echoing like gunshots through the sauna-thick air. Then eight heads jack-in-the-boxed out of the lake near our dugout canoe. "Wow, giant otters!" whispered Gilder Macuapa, our guide at Chalalán Ecolodge in Bolivia's Amazon jungle.

He stealthily manoeuvred the canoe behind a curtain of branches so we could watch the world's largest otters hunt for fish. While my five-year-old daughter snorted back at the endangered 2m-long mammals, Macuapa explained why he was so excited. "We have never seen this many here before. It means our conservation is working." 

Macuapa was born in San José de Uchupiamonas, the Qhecua-Tacana community that owns and manages Chalalán Ecolodge, located on the Tuichi River in Madidi National Park. His mother, Emerécia Nabia, was one of the lodge's founders in 1997. He and other Josesanos (as the community members call themselves) are able to earn income through eco-tourism, which helps sustain their community and the jungle they love.

"Chalalán has been a school for everyone," Macuapa said. "Many people from other communities also came to work here and saw how important it was to conserve the trees and the animals."

Madidi National Park is one of the most biodiverse places on the planet, in part because it bridges a range of biomes, from snowy 6,000m peaks in the Andes to low-lying wetlands, pampas, dry forests and rainforests. Created in 1995, the park covers 1,895,750 hectares and is home to more than 12,000 types of plants, 1,200 kinds of birds, 120,000 insect species and charismatic mammals like tapir, jaguars, monkeys and giant otters.

Our family booked a five-day stay at the ecolodge in hopes of catching a glimpse of some of the park's bounty. We also wanted to experience the unique cultural diversity in the Bolivian Amazon, which is why we chose the community-run Chalalán. Of the four Indigenous territories that overlap with Madidi, San José de Uchupiamonas is the only one that lies completely within the park's boundaries.

It wasn't easy getting to the lodge. After flying from La Paz, Bolivia's capital, to the small town of Rurrenabaque, Macuapa met us at the airport. Our two kids giggled when he told them his first name, Gilder, means "big tree" in Tacana, one of four languages he speaks fluently. Early the next morning we loaded into a long motorised canoe for a six-hour, very wet ride up the Beni and Tuichi rivers to the ecolodge.

Another guest, Margrethe Rasmussen from Copenhagen, Denmark, joined our family. This was her second visit to Chalalán. "It's the best place I can be, in the jungle. You can feel it's so clean in there… so alive," she said. "And Chalalán is absolutely my favourite."

Since it was the start of Bolivia's summer rainy season, the five of us would have Chalalán's lush trails and glittering lake all to ourselves. During high season, the lodge often fills to its 20-guest capacity. 

During our upriver cruise to the lodge, we paused to watch a family of capybaras eating plants on the riverbank. Near the confluence of the mighty Beni and Tuichi rivers, the driver beached our canoe for lunch: plantains, cold roast chicken and oranges. A flock of noisy, colourful macaws flew overhead. Around 14:00, we "docked" on Chalalán's muddy bank. Shouldering our backpacks, we cinched our ponchos for the 20-minute hike to the lodge – our family's first nature walk in the Amazon.

Macuapa pointed out a 2cm-long bullet ant traversing the trail, so named because "its bite hurts worse than being shot, trust me". He then stopped to kneel at a depression in the mud. "Jaguar track," he said. My son gasped, impressed. Scooping up a handful of brown leaves, Macuapa sniffed them then passed the leaves to me. "Jaguar piss. The female is ready to mate."

The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) has been monitoring jaguars in the Tuichi River valley of Madidi National Park since 2001, according to Robert Wallace, a senior conservation scientist with WCS in Bolivia. Camera traps show that the population of these big cats is slowly climbing, from less than two animals per 100 sq km two decades ago to around six animals per 100 sq km today. The number of tapir, brocket deer and white-lipped peccary have also increased in Madidi, all of which are mainstays of a jaguar's diet, Wallace told me.

Wallace believes that the uptick in wildlife is "a very good indicator" that ecotourism enterprises like Chalalán are compatible with conserving the Bolivian Amazon's incredible natural resources.

"Indigenous communities were already committed to a sustainable vision for their forest and have been some of the most important defenders of the protected area," Wallace said. "Tourism is a way for them to benefit from that commitment, and at the same time, share their culture with the rest of Bolivia and the rest of the world."

The San José de Uchipamonias community created Chalalán Ecolodge with help from Yosseph "Yossi" Ghinsberg, an Israeli adventurer famous for surviving for three weeks alone in the Bolivian Amazon in 1981. Ghinsberg's harrowing experience was featured in the 2017 movie Jungle and also documented in his bestselling book Back From Tuichi, published in 1993. He was rescued by an American friend who asked the Josesanos to help search for Ghinsberg after government authorities gave up.

Macuapa told us stories about Ghinsberg while we canoed around Lake Chalalán one evening. My son's favourite was how Ghinsberg deliberately hugged a tree covered in fire ants. The painful stings triggered an adrenaline rush that gave Ghinsberg the strength to keep walking – starving, hallucinating and covered in a fungal rash – through the jungle toward the Tuichi River, where the Josesanos eventually found him.

In 1992, Ghinsberg returned to Bolivia to repay the community that saved his life. He championed their decision to build Chalalán and helped garner support from the Inter-American Development Bank and Conservation International.

"We have also always lived in harmony with nature," Macuapa told us, "but we needed a little more incentive and motivation to continue conserving everything." 

In addition to employing community members, profits from the lodge also pay for services that benefit many residents of San José de Uchipamonias. 

"The lodge has encouraged education in English and contributed towards health care and a school for the community, as well as clean water. It is a very successful story," said Jasmin Caballero, general manager of America Tours Bolivia. She and her husband, David Ricaldi, a biologist, were hired by Conservation International from 1998-2000 to train Josesanos in hospitality and guiding services.

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When Caballero first began working with the community, most Josesanos hadn't finished high school. Now, many of the sons and daughters of those first employees have finished university, she said. Macuapa is a case in point: he travelled to La Paz at age 18 to study at university, where he faced discrimination for being Indigenous and speaking Spanish as a second language. He went on to become a surgical nurse for nine years.

But when his wife died of cancer at a young age, leaving him as the sole caretaker for their 18-month-old son, Macuapa moved back to San José de Uchipamonias – and to Chalalán, where he had worked as support staff from age 15 to 18. He told me this story one afternoon as we paddled through the still, steamy air on the lake, which is the centrepiece of Chalalan's wild property.

"I chose to return to nature, the jungle that I love. Nature and the work that I do as a guide has been a very great therapy for me to get rid of depression," Macuapa said. 

As if on cue, a turquoise-and-peach agami heron lifted off from a log. I followed it with binoculars, mouth agape at its grace. The kids pointed out small yellow squirrel monkeys frolicking in the dense canopy along the shore. Macuapa kept our canoe steady as we watched the babies leap between branches in search of fruit.

After the paddle, our housekeeper and waitress, Jovanna, met us with glasses of fresh lemonade and bananas. I retreated to our cabin for a shower. The simple, screened-in wooden building was plenty comfortable, with cosy twin beds and mosquito nets, as well as a private bathroom. While I napped, I heard the kids exclaiming over a toucan that alighted on a palm. They happily chased the clouds of butterflies swirling in the sun, easily catching a half-dozen with each pass of their net before letting them fly free again.

The next morning, Macuapa took us on a longer trek along some of Chalalán's 50km of trails. He unveiled the wonders of the jungle and how his people use its treasures: some trees whose bark tastes like garlic for cooking, others that can be tapped for drinking water or rubber; bugs to eat, including the rich liquid inside the rear-end of a queen leaf-cutter ant, which "tastes like butter" according to my son.

Macuapa lifted our daughter to his shoulder to point out a flock of huaxín perched in the trees, prehistoric birds that look like a peacock crossed with a pheasant. He showed my husband edible orange mushrooms sprouting from a log.

Macuapa also taught us which creepy-crawlies to avoid, like the tiny poison-dart frog. Its toxic skin excretions were used by his ancestors to coat spears or arrows to kill prey almost instantly. He also showed us fun tricks, like how to repel mosquitos by blowing through a bamboo leaf to mimic the sound of a predatory fly. "Nature is very strategic, right?" Macuapa said, smiling as our kids blew through their leaf-kazoos.

Back at the lodge, I sat on the shaded porch with Macuapa. He told me that it hasn't always been easy to keep the lodge afloat. The community has faced a host of challenges in keeping the doors open, ranging from financial struggles during Covid to maintenance headaches to reduced airline flights servicing the region.

Perhaps the greatest hurdle facing Chalalán, he said, is warding off poachers, miners, loggers and others attempting to extract natural resources from within Madidi National Park.

One of the biggest threats to people and wildlife in the Tuichi River is illegal gold mining, according to Wallace. As miners dredge the river in search of gold, the water becomes choked with silt and contaminated with mining waste, including toxic mercury that's used to separate out gold. "It's a big problem, not just for Madidi but throughout Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador," said Wallace.

Macuapa is worried that the government wants to build a hydroelectric dam on the Beni River near Rurrenabaque that would flood much of the jungle near Chalalán. "Imagine that thousands of lives are going to disappear: insects, amphibians, mammals, birds. Imagine that there is an overflow of this dam, and we are going to see communities disappear. These are our fears." 

Macuapa said that his children give him the "strength to continue fighting" so that the jungle that has supported him and his community can be "preserved for future generations to come".

On our last morning at Chalalán, my daughter and I braved a dip in the bath-like water of the lake – piranhas and all. We heard the giant otters snorting across the water. "Mama, will the otters eat us?" my daughter asked, stroking quickly back to the ladder.

"No, but the caimans will," her brother replied from the safety of the dock. I laughed, but didn't linger in the murky water. 

After drying off, we enjoyed one last meal in the lodge with Macuapa: quinoa soup and catfish fresh from the Tuichi River. When I asked him about the odds of seeing a jaguar on the boat ride back to Rurrenabaque, he downed his papaya juice and grinned. "Everything is possible. Nothing is certain."

Green Getaways is a BBC Travel series that helps travellers experience a greener, cleaner approach to getting out and seeing the world.

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