Earlier this year, I was on the rivers — the northern reaches of Noel Kempff Mercado, where the Iténez and the Paraguá do most of the work for you. The current carries the day's logic. What you see, you see from the boat.
The southern sector is a different proposition entirely. For the past several months, my attention has shifted toward the Caparú-Huanchaca region — remote forest, open pampa, sandstone cliffs falling away into waterfalls, and above it all the meseta itself. If the north was defined by movement on water, this next phase will be defined by everything water doesn't do for you: long overland approaches, uncertain roads, remote camps, the eventual ascent onto the plateau.
And honestly, that's precisely what makes it compelling.
A Reconnaissance, Not a Tour
.Flights are booked: July 28 through August 18, with departure from Santa Cruz around the 30th and park entry near August 1. I've stopped thinking of this as a future photography tour and started treating it for what it really is — a reconnaissance expedition.
Over the past several weeks I've been in close conversation with current and former guardaparques, local contacts, and park leadership, including a number of long calls with SERNAP director Ramiro Claros Prado. One of those calls turned up something encouraging. Last November and December, Ramiro and a SERNAP crew ran road-clearing operations between Florida and Los Fierros, primarily for firefighting access. Some of that route will need clearing again before August, but the work appears to have preserved overland access far deeper into the southern sector than I'd assumed possible. More surprising still: those vehicle tracks I'd been studying in satellite imagery, the ones continuing toward El Encanto — they're real. They go through.
That changes a great deal. Earlier planning had assumed long carries on foot. If these tracks hold, we may be able to spend our time in the region rather than simply getting to it — which is, after all, the point.
Plenty remains uncertain. Access to Laguna Chaplin is still an open question. Fire conditions through the dry season will need watching closely as we get nearer to departure. And the plateau itself raises its own set of questions — whether it can be reached reliably within a safe operational window, where the water is, what can actually be carried, where camps can be made without leaving a trace. These are not questions you answer from a desk.
Wild on its Own Terms
What's become clear through these conversations is that the southern sector isn't really conventional tourism terrain — and the people responsible for it don't want it to be. The vision from park leadership is closer to scientific or expeditionary tourism: small groups, low impact, real conservation values at the center of it. That happens to be exactly what I've been envisioning all along.
Modern wildlife tourism has, for the most part, been smoothed — fixed lodges, predictable circuits, habituated wildlife, schedules you can set your watch by. Noel Kempff still feels genuinely wild, especially in the south. Which also means the margin for error is narrower, and the challenge worth taking on: not whether a conventional tourism model can be brought into a fragile environment, but whether a low-volume, conservation-anchored expedition approach can exist there at all.
For now, the project remains what it is: maps, planning documents, permit applications, gear lists, long phone calls, and a steadily accumulating set of questions that can only be answered in the field.
Which, if I'm honest, may be the best part of expedition planning to begin with.
