Testimony to the Wild and Beautiful

Update 5

AmazonQuest is an interactive expedition developed by Classroom Connect. For five weeks, a team of scientists and explorers are examining one of the most distinctive and most threatened environments on Earth: the Amazon River basin.

The AmazonQuest team is in a zone that seems to have a large population of jaguars. This one was bathing in a pool.

Nick woke up this morning, which was good.

After Carlos squeezed the juice of "planta de raya" in Nick's stingray wound, the pain subsided some, but his head started spinning. We led him to a tent, wrapped him in a sheet, and let him sleep. Dan and Bernadette checked on him every hour. In the morning, he woke up groggy. His big toe looked like a half-eaten wiener, red, swollen, and erupting with watery blisters. Now we had a new problem.

When stingrays strike, their stinger imbeds deep. When it retracts, it leaves pieces of its sheath. That causes infection. Carlos knows people who have died from stingray stings, but it turns out that it was the infection that killed them.

Nick spent the day in the canoe, keeping his festering toe out of the water. As the day unfolded, his toe grew. Dan called a doctor at noon, who said we should get him to a clinic immediately. The bad news is that we're at least a week away from the nearest clinic. Everyone is worried about Nick.

VIDEO View the team's daily movie feature on the AmazonQuest site Play video (QuickTime, Real or Windows Media)   EXTRA INFORMATION AmazonQuest  from Classroom Connect     AmazonQuest Get more on AmazonQuest from the scrollbox below MORE REPORTS Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 5 Day 6 Day 7 Day 8 Day 9 Day 10 Day 11 Day 12 Day 13 Day 14 Day 15 Day 16 Day 17 Day 18 Day 19 Day 20 Day 21 Day 22 Day 23

But stingray stings aren't our only worry here on the Río Azul. We believe this place should be protected. Our mission here has been to gather evidence and testimony for the creation of the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve.

For the past five days we've taken a grueling journey down a river with some of the world's highest biodiversity. We've met only one person and have seen no evidence of deforestation or destruction. As David said one day, "When you stand here and look around, it's hard to imagine the rainforest could be threatened."

But it is.

Roads to the north and south bring thousands of highland settlers hungry for farmland and willing to cut down rainforest to get it. Our friend Andres' impact on the land bordering the Río Azul is small, but what if there were thousands of people like Andres cutting their way from the nearest road into this fragile place? The impact would be huge.

Charlie Munn, the conservationist who directed us to explore this river, told me about mining towns on the southeastern edge of this zone that "look like a nuclear bomb was dropped." He described a grim scene of top loaders "scraping away the forest to get at the gold beneath it." This same industrial-scale gold mining pollutes nearby rivers with mercury, a deadly byproduct of gold processing.

Since 1992, local Amarakaeri, Machiguenga, and Yine peoples have been organizing and lobbying for the creation of a million-acre communal reserve that they would control and care for. Creating a reserve here would protect the unique animals and plants of the Río Azul and surrounding areas and provide a means for local people to make a sustainable living off the forest as well. Most important, it would prevent logging companies, miners, settlers and others from coming in, taking what they want, and leaving a path of destruction behind them.

This past week we've experienced nature like we've never seen it before. We spotted a pair of rare blue-headed macaws feeding at a clay lick. We stood in awe while a jaguar bathed herself in a pool.

To put things in perspective, Oscar, our guide, spends all his time in the jungle and is lucky if he sees three jaguars a year. The fact that we saw one at midday -- and spotted many more jaguar tracks -- means there is a sizable population of these predators in this zone.

Add to this many tapirs, peccaries, brown capuchin monkeys, deer, caimans, turtles and hundreds of parrots of all kinds and you realize that this place is one of nature's last refuges.

Aside from protecting nature, the Amarakaeri Reserve will make the people of these forests owners of their traditional lands. Today, while paddling along with Esteban, I asked him what this would mean to him and his people.

"It's a chance for us to make a living while saving the rainforest that we depend on," he said with great seriousness.

He hopes they can attract more adventurous tourists like us to experience the rainforest and to boost the local economy in the process.

Chasing hope,

John Fox and Dan Buettner