In early 1996 most of the adult members of the Eseieja Native Community of Tambopata, Peru gathered to discuss and unanimously sign a 20 year contract with a private Peruvian tour company called Rainforest Expeditions to develop an ecotour operation within community territory, giving birth to the Eseieja Ecotourism Project. It was the first time in the community's 20 year history that any kind of meeting had managed to exceed the quorum neccesary to make it official.
Almost two years later, this good omen is being proven correct by the project's first product, Posada Amazonas Lodge, a 23 bedroom ecolodge that opens March 1, 1998. The lodge is being built on the community's largest tract of intact rain forest and is directly adjacent to the pristine, Connecticut-sized, Tambopata Candamo Reserved Zone in southeastern Amazonian Peru. Posada Amazonas not only hopes to become a first class lodge and nature tour destination but also a succesful pilot in community and private enterprise partnerships working to develop a profitable ecotourism product that effectively catalyzes the conservation of natural and wildlife resources.
The concept of the project is not new to either partner. Back in 1989, when Rainforest Expeditions, was beginning operations in Tambopata with the construction of its thirteen bedroom lodge, Tambopata Research Center, in the uninhabited nucleus of the reserve, company president Eduardo Nycander proposed a similar arrangement to the community. At that time, as a young regional foreigner (Nycander is from Peru's capital, Lima) with no background or references in the region, Eseieja community members had no reason to believe a relationship with a tourist entrepeneur should be any different from those conducted in the past: neutral, at best. Almost two decades of a profitable nature tourism industry in Tambopata had left little benefit in the community. As a matter of fact, most ecotour industry academics still agree that the industry's greatest challenge is to prove its reputed ability to generate local employment or locally owned operations. Many doubt it can.
Fortunately, time gave Rainforest Expeditions and the Eseieja Native Community a second try. A firm believer that successful conservation efforts and legitimate ecotourism projects require local participation, Rainforest Expeditions has always had an aggressive policy of cooperating with and integrating the Eseiejas into its tourism projects at Tambopata Research Center at an individual or institutional level. After three or four years these actions earned RFE the respect, which soon became friendship, of 30 or 40 members of the native community. The rest of the community viewed with curiosity what had initially been viewed with distrust. In late 1995, Jose Mishaja, the president of the Eseieja Native Community asked the managers of RFE to please involve the community at a communal, rather than an individual level in RFEis tourism plans, and expressed interest in perhaps integrating the community as a whole into the regional tourism industry. Several months later RFE and the Eseieja Native Community were signing a 20 year contract to develop a lodge within the communityis territory, giving birth to the Keieway (which means harpy eagle in Eseieja) Association and the Eseieja Ecotourism Project.
The Eseieja ecotourism project is designed to introduce this activity in a gradual manner compatible with the current Eseieja lifestyle without necessarily signifying a delay in the generation of income from this economic alternative. Preliminary evaluations, business planning, lodge construction and personnel training, for example, were or are being executed simultaneously to the first short tourist visits to the community that have been running since mid-1996. Thus, the community was investing and repaying the nature interpretation infrastructure which was required to host the first visitors while constructing the more ambitious lodge infrastructure and designing training workshops for community members interested in lodge positions. Initial visits to the community involve natural history attractions exclusively to avoid potential negative tourist-community interactions that could stem from cultural visits to the community. While these more sensitive programs are designed, tourists are visiting harpy eagle nests and lakes with giant river otters.
Meanwhile, lodge construction began in April 1997 and opening day is scheduled for March, 1998. The construction of the lodge has acted as an income injection to the community: 20 families signed up to produce 10,000 weaved palm fronds for the roofs, 15 families cut wood and 10 collected wild cane for the wall linings. Likewise, 65 families signed up for the 5-6 months of field work that the lodge assembly is taking. Each individual will work on this for one week, providing all the necessary manpower to complete the lodge. At president Juan Pesha's request, this work is voluntary. The only construction material for the lodge that will not be entirely gathered within community territory is the tropical mahogany required for the floors. This scarce lumber is being bought from a "sustainable" provider: the company cuts planks and boards only from mahogany trees that fall naturally into the river from bank erosion.
Training for lodge positions begins in the first trimester of 1997 with two workshops of a different nature. The first one is designed to help community members define clearly what each job is about, whereas the second one will be job specific, i.e. each member will participate only in the workshop for the job he or she has chosen. All community members are invited to sign up for the first workshop, where, after extensive and detailed oral, written and audiovisual explanations of each job, community members will fill out forms listing the positions they would like to apply for, as well answer questionnaires regarding their skills and work availabilities during the year. The second workshops, programmed for April and May, will be designed so that participants from the first workshop are trained specifically for the positions they have chosen to apply for. Thus for several days, participants will be trained in the procedures and responsibilities of each position as applied specifically to the lodge. This workshop will also serve as a communal selection process, where the instructor, a member of the Community's Ecotourism Commitee, a member of Rainforest Expeditions and the participants themselves will grade or vote on the applicants suitability for each position. Applicants will then be selected based on a combination of this result and their work availability, which may be limited to several months out of the year because many community members tend farms or gather brazil nuts. This limited availability actually favors the creation of a rotatory contracting system which in turn maximizes the direct benefit provided by salaries and employmente to a larger proportion of community members. This rotatory system, obviously, has to be limited so as to prove efficient and so that it does not affect service standards.
Although the areas of the project involving communal training and empowerement are vital, they will be useless if Posada Amazonas does not sell, requiring solid product development and marketing strategies. The Posada Amazonas ecotourism product targets a general nature tourist who wants a quality introductory experience to the rain forest. In a nutshell the Posada Amazonas nature tour is a three or four day tour into a well preserved area of rain forest where activities are based out of a very comfortable lodge (with facilities uncommonly found in other Amazonian lodges such as private bathrooms, hot water, bar and lounge, etc) designed to maximize wildlife observations. Activities themselves are all easily accesible (beginning with Posada Amazonas itself, which is a brief three hour boat ride from the gateway city of Puerto Maldonado, connected to major tourist destinations in Peru via daily commercial flights) and based around widlife attractions, the natural history of the rain forest and the interaction between the native community and the rainforest. The wildlife attractions, which are the core of the program, are all highly predictable and inexistent in the better known but more disturbed Amazonian destinations of Manaus, Brazil or Iquitos, Peru. In three or four day stays, tourists visiting Posada Amazonas will be able to see most if not all of the following wildlife spectacles: parrots and macaws eating clay at a lick, harpy eagles or other large eagles at their nests, peccary, pacarana and maybe even tapir ingesting clay at a lick, and giant river otters at an oxbow lake. Few Amazonian destinations can match that list, and certainly none that are a brief three hour boat ride from a commercial flight.
Results with the nesting harpy eagles, for example, are encouraging. The harpy eagle, the worldis most powerful bird of prey, measuring over a meter in height and getting its name from a spectacular crest on its crown, is not only highly endangered and poorly studied, but is also a highly prized birdwatching trophy. Once the native community understood its value as a tourism resource and members took the job of searching for them seriously, four active nests were identified (more than are known to science for all of Peru) in addition to nests from equally spectacular crested eagles, black and white hawk eagles and king vultures. More than half of the ecotourists returning from RFE-owned Tambopata Research Center now stop to observe one of the nests and sight the sought-after trophy. Additionally, magazines such as Wild Bird and documentaries such as Manu, Peru's Hidden Rainforest have featured it. On the other hand, the attitude of the community towards the harpy eagle and other large eagles in general has changed dramatically. Although the harpy eagle was held in high esteem and that those members that had some kind of contact with this bird hold a privileged position, contact in the past varied from simple observation of an individual harpy to hunting one. In the past two years, and thanks largely to its new image as an economic resource, the community has named the harpy eagle as the symbol of the community and the communityis soccer team has been officially named Las Aguilas (the Eagles). Community members who find a harpy eagle nest now become the guardians of the nest and have the duty of protecting it and reporting observed activity, in exchange for a fee paid the guardian everytime a tourist visits the nest. On May, 1996, during the opening ceremony for the local soccer tournament, a short, simple play was enacted where a 5-year old kid dressed as a harpy eagle "flew" into the center of the field, hunted a sloth (teddy bear) and took it to its chick in the nest (a dressed-up 3 year old standing atop an artificial nest). As the play was being enacted, a community member read a 3 minute note explaining the importance of protecting the harpy eagle. Presently, the community has declared protected those areas that are within an 800 meter radius of the nest and a 500 meter margin to each side of the access trails. In this manner, the community has protected around 600 hectares, or 7% of its territory, with the specific purpose of conserving the harpies habitat. Other neighboring communities now know the community as the land of the eagles or the community of the eagles. The community begins to feel pride of having these magnificent birds in their territory and feel privileged to have such good fortune.
Similar results are being obtained for the other wildlife resources which are or will be consistenly shown to tourists. Three different mammal clay licks have already been identified which will surely become tourist favorites: they are clay deposits on the ground where different species of mammals (tapir, peccary, pacarana, and others) congregate to eat clay throughout the day. These three licks, traditionally used by community members to hunt, are now off- limits to hunters as they are judged more valuable as tourism resources. Similarly, a parrot and macaw clay lick, where different species of parrots and macaws congregate on most clear mornings of the year to eat the clay on a riverbank deposit, a phenomenon widely appreciated by ecotourists, has sparked community leaders to protect the forests directly in front of the clay lick. They have also mentioned to Nycander that they would like to implement a nesting and rearing project similar to the one executed at Tambopata Research Center (which was featured in the January 1994, National Geographic issue). In effect, they have implicitly asked Nycander to design and implement such a project for the community. Finally, the fourth important wildlife attraction in the community, the oxbow lakes with giant river otters have already generated similar initiatives, instigating community leaders to protect forests directly around the lake.
A final important aspect of the ecoutourism project is the constant analysis of the impact of tourism on the community's everyday life. Using a variety of techniques borrowed from the social sciences, anthropologist Amanda Stronza has been working with the community since 1996 to help community members shape their expectations as to the benefits of the project realistically. Initially, community members that had had little or no experience in tourism had difficulty understanding what concepts such as vacation, tourism or lodge mean. Similarly, many community members did not grasp fully their role as partners in the association. For weeks Nycander, Stronza and Silverio Duri, a member of the Ecotourism Committe, visited each family with graphics drawing parallels between farm investments and returns, loans, and labor and the tourism project. In order to identify what resources community members wanted to show tourists (and what they didn't want to show tourists) Stronza gave several families a disposable camera and collected the films several weeks later. Almost two years after the continous application of these and other methodologies, community members grasped the concepts of tourism, fully comprehended their role as a partner and shaped more precise expectations as to the short and long term impacts of the tourism projects on their lives. The members of the Ecotourism Commitee now almost single handedly solve problems which crop up or are foreseen in the daily operations of the project, consult them with Rainforest Expeditions for approval, and then communicate their decisions to the community, generally having widespread support. For example, when the seven large eagle nests were discovered, a problem arose because, initially, a fee for every tourist that visited an active harpy eagle nest had been pacted for the guardian of that particular eagle. This fee, against all projections, was suddenly multiplied by seven, and became a substantial variable cost. The problem was explained by Rainforest Expeditions to the Ecotourism Commitee, who determined that only the guardians of the nests that were actually visited would be paid the fee, and even added to each guardian's duties that of clearing and maintaining the best, shortest trail to the nest. Not only does The Ecotourism Commitee solve problems but it also suggests direction changes or improvements to the business plan or product development strategies continually based on their knowledge of the rain forest and the communities needs, expectations and idiosincracies. Thus each partner is fulfilling his role adeptly: Rainforest Expeditions articulates with the marketplace whereas the Ecotourism Commitee articulates with the community.
Although the various ecotourism and conservation projects of Posada Amazonas and the Eseieja Ecotourism Project are still in their initial stages, they have already generated symbiotic interactions between them that are effectively showing encouraging results in the protection of several widlilfe and forest resources, in the empowerement of community members to aptly manage the project, and in preliminary reactions of the market towards the tourism product. There are still numerous challenges lying ahead but the experiences described here speak clearly of the benefits in terms of conservation and sound business planning of involving local communities in the decision-making and benefit-sharing of any conservation or ecotourism initiative.
Posada Amazonas is accesible from the town of Puerto Maldonado via a three hour boat ride up the Tambopata River. Puerto Maldonado is connected to Lima, Peru or Cuzco, Peru by daily commercial flights. Travel arrangements can be made through Rainforest Expeditions. (U.S. contact: Mario Corvetto, tel: 303-838-9412, email: mlcorvetto@aol.com; Peru contact: Kurt Holle, tel: (511)- 221-4182, fax: (511) - 421-8183; email: rforest@perunature.com; web: http://www.perunature.com).
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