My rant on shoddy ecotourism at Explorer’s Inn

After returning to town, I followed Tim, Ariel, and Danielle to Explorer’s Inn, an ecotourism lodge on the Río Tambopata. Emma had worked there 9 years ago when she first came to Peru and had suggested we could try volunteering there. Explorer’s is much closer to town (1.5 hrs) and was also so different from Piedras in so many other ways, I could scarcely believe it. Right off the bat, my introduction to Explorer’s Inn was very different. To get to the lodge, I shared a boat with 3 tourists who were paying 3 to 5 times as much as the volunteers. We zipped along in a fancy boat with an outboard motor and were presented with pack lunches boxed in styrofoam. VERY environmentally friendly, and a stark contrast to the delicious parcels of rice wrapped in banana leaves that Garza had prepared for everyone on the way back from Piedras.

I had decided to volunteer at Explorer’s Inn because of their long-standing reputation for welcoming scientists and producing important research on plants, animals, and conservation. For the past two or three decades, they have had a Resident Naturalist (RN) program, which allows biologists to conduct their fieldwork there. RNs receive free room and board while conducting their studies in return for giving a few lectures so that guests can learn more about the forest and conservation. Because of this reputation, I had been eagerly anticipating a stimulating, intellectual environment where I could learn from researchers and help out with their ongoing projects. Similar to Piedras, their ongoing projects were supposed to include macaw monitoring, mammal transects, and otter and caiman monitoring. Sadly, the reality at Explorer’s was far different. It appears that their focus has shifted almost entirely from research to tourism and to raking in profits by whatever means possible.

There were 3 RNs there, who were supposed to coordinate us volunteers. But for the most part, these RNs seemed more preoccupied with partying and lazing around than in doing serious research. The only person there who I felt was really passionate about the rainforest and serious about his work was Javier, a visiting botanist who was only staying for 2 weeks. I had expected the RNs to be really passionate about their research, like Emma. Half the time though, they were recovering from hangovers or making up excuses to not do anything: “Oh, it’s too hot. I just walked for one whole hour today and I can’t do any more work now.” I was not impressed at all, especially after witnessing Emma’s superhuman work ethic; some days she would wake up at 3am to walk a 7-hr mammal transect in reverse and then cross the river to monitor macaws for another 4 hours. The RNs at Explorer’s were doing similar studies (monitoring macaws and walking transects, though on much shorter transects), but even when they did go out to work, they could barely muster up the motivation to stay at the macaw lick for more than an hour. Part of the problem was that these were not their own projects; these were all long-term, ongoing projects conceived by other people in faraway universities. However, the RNs did not even seem motivated to design and carry out their own research projects! They were all pleasant enough people, but I could not believe how disorganized and unmotivated they were. Ariel, Tim, D, and I all arrived at Explorer’s Inn really excited and ready to do more work, but they couldn’t even get their own act together, let alone figure out how to make us useful.

To be a bit fairer, I also pitied the RNs a bit, as they received no support for doing research from the managers who run the lodge. The RNs received free room and board, but weren’t really respected or given any authority by the managers, who didn’t seem to consider conservation a priority at all, apart from its role in making money. Here, tourists (and their money) ruled. If the tourists wanted to go to the macaw collpa, they were given priority and we would not be able to monitor the macaws that day. I really disagreed with the way things were run there, on many different levels. I couldn’t believe that while riding on their reputation as great conservationists, they dump all the waste (including human waste) straight into the river. When I asked them about this, they informed me that they used to have a septic tank but that it is broken and they haven’t bothered to fix it. While I was there, I also discovered that the managers have a pet wildcat that they supposedly “rescued” from town. What’s more, they actually wanted to offer WATER SKIING on the oxbow lakes, which are home to endangered giant otters! Fortunately, this bright idea was shot down by the owner of Explorer’s Inn, who lives somewhere in Europe. From what Emma has said, the owner is actually quite a sound guy and quite committed to conservation, but he is now very old, lives far away, and isn’t really that active in running things anymore.

There were no educational talks the whole time I was there (really, there was no one capable of giving a talk, apart from the botanist). Even just from the tourist point-of-view, I was surprised by how little the guides knew and how little they were trained. Most of the guides are from big cities like Lima and only work there for a 6 months or so. They are supposed to collect otter monitoring data every time they take tourists out on the lake, but most of them can’t be bothered to even do that, and the managers don’t push it. Then one day, I overheard some loud-mouthed tourist gushing about her encounter with a monkey: “Geez, I’m starving right now because the monkey took my breakfast.” I turned to her and asked her what she meant. “Oh, we came across a group of monkeys on the trail this morning and my guide told me I could give my banana to one of them.” Great. Pretty soon the monkeys will be coming down from the trees and biting tourists who don’t give them food, just like the ones around some of the nature reserves in Hong Kong. I was shocked that the guides were encouraging this kind of behavior from tourists instead of educating them. Not only are things like this bad for conservation, but it’s just plain bad science too. How are you supposed to collect good data on mammal transects when the managers salt the trails and the tourists hand out food to the animals? And do they really think they are helping the monkeys by setting food out for them behind the kitchen?

On top of that, we volunteers were treated like second-rate tourists. Since they clearly didn’t care about the research, they also didn’t care about our role in helping with research. They seemed to really only want us there for the money we paid ($20/day) to cover room and board. We were asked to change rooms twice in one day, and then finally all four of us were crammed into one room meant for 2 people and that had no toilet seat in its bathroom. For the most part, the managers completely ignored us, aside from the times they collected our money or got angry at us for sitting in the “wrong place” at dinner and accidentally splitting up tour groups (lest any of the tourists be forced to talk to people outside of their groups!). The social dynamics at Explorer’s were also a world apart from Piedras. There were probably 20 to 30 tourists there (in the high season they can take on as many as 80 at a time!) and tons of staff serving them right and left. There is a very clear divide between the staff and the tourists with close to zero interaction between the tourists and any of the employees, apart from their guide. All of us ended up cutting short our volunteering stint there and leaving much earlier than we had expected.

The whole situation is really quite sad. The managers think they are catering to tourists´ desires but really they are pandering to their ignorance. The typical tourist here, fresh off the Inca Trail and Machu Picchu circus in Cusco, would spend about 2 days here, rushing through the forest with their huge tour groups, feeding the pet macaw at the lodge, and apparently feeding monkeys in the forest. Since many of these tourists have never been to the rainforest before, let alone the Amazon, I think that the people who run these ecotourism lodges are in a unique position to educate the tourists about conservation and how to minimize their impact on the environment. Maybe my opinion of tourists is overly optimistic, but I would like to think that most tourists would actually respond quite well to this and would actually want to learn about these issues.

While I would not go back to Explorer’s and would not recommend it to anyone (at least with the way it is at the moment), in a way it was good for me to witness some of the ways that ecotourism can go very wrong. At least now I know the difference between the kind of ecotourism that I would like to support (Emma’s) and the kind of ecotourism I want to steer clear from. Unfortunately though, these issues become much much more complicated when you delve deeper. While I disagree with Explorer Inn’s brand of ecotourism, there are other lodges that are even worse. And if I had to choose between Explorer’s Inn and clear-cutting the whole forest, filling the rivers with mercury from gold-panning, or drilling for oil and spilling it everywhere? In that case, I would probably go for Explorer’s Inn. Ecotourism everywhere is rife with problems; it can have a harmful impact on the environment and wildlife (e.g. jeeps full of tourists chasing cheetahs across the African savannah), can be terribly exploitative of indigenous populations, and can be just as good as oil or logging at exploiting the resources of the region while returning very little to the local people who actually live there. However, because ecotourism obviously depends much more on preserving the environment than other industries, I still think it is better than some of the alternatives. It scares me that a lot of ecotourism doesn’t seem to be done in a really sustainable way, but still, from what I have seen it seems at least more sustainable than oil or logging. And while Explorer’s Inn could do so many things SO much better, at least for the moment they have still managed to maintain quite a sizable chunk of stunning Amazon rainforest.