The Kapawi Experiment (May/June 2001)

In Ecuador's upper Amazon, visitors shoot the breeze with Achuar shamans and try to help stave off Big Oil

BY PAUL BENNETT

It was 110 degrees. Layers of airborne dust floated in the slatted rays of sunlight. We were squatting on our haunches in a dark, humid hut in the Ecuadorian Amazon, waiting like French existentialists for the B village shaman. There were three of us, all guests at an innovative tourist property called Kapawi Ecolodge and Reserve, along with a local guide and an interpreter. When the shaman arrived, he cut a daunting figure, even in dirty jeans and a ragged Chicago Cubs T-shirt. He strode into the hush with an almost sexy swagger, a kind of Robert Plant of the jungle, and proceeded to regale us, in excruciating detail, with a story about the violent revenge he once took on another village to avenge the honor of his daughter. During the story; our guide kept a nervous eye on the shotguns slung across the shaman's chair.
It wasn't what we'd expected, but then this was no rehearsed performance, and the shaman, Alejandro, wasn't being paid lo meet with us. However, both he and our guide did Have an indirect stake in Kapawi as members of die Achuar tribe, a group of about .5,000 that lives scattered over two million acres in southeastern Ecuador's Oriente region, near Peru.
A few years ago, the Achuar inked a deal to bring the lodge to their corner of the upper Amazon, the project is being watched internationally as an example of how ecotourism ought to work. What makes Kapawi stand out is the fact that the tribe has an ownership stake in the property. Tie Achuar collect rent and other fees from their tour-operator partner; ten years from now, the tribe will own the lodge. In most ecotourism outfits, the best locals can hope for is to work as hired hands.
" Kapawi was groundbreaking, as it was one of the first to make a direct business partnership with the indigenous community," says Megan Epler Wood, the president of the International Ecotourism Society, which lobbies governments and international organizations. Kapawi lodge is almost unique in that revenues flow to an entire tribe. But indigenous ownership in other forms has taken root in a number of locations around the world. An Inuit community-is the co-owner of Canada's Bathurst Inlet Lodge, in Nunavul, an operation that features wildlife viewing. Desert Tracks, an Australian outfitter, is fully owned by Aborigines (see ADVENTURE, January/February 2001, "Getting the Green Light"). And in the Amazon, several eeolociges now operate with significant ownership by local tribes. Peru's Machiguenga Center for Tropical Studies, for instance, which opened just last year, is owned by a local Indian community (see Adventure Guide, page 42).

Swinging at Bird land
To reach Kapawi Ecolodgc. we flew cast from the capital city of Quito for two hours in a single-engine plane, up over the spine of the Ancles, past an active volcano, and down into the oceanic green of the upper Amazon Basin. After a bumpy landing on a red-clay airstrip hacked from the jungle alongside the Capahuari River, we boarded a six-passenger motorized dugout canoe for a two-hour ride downstream to the lodge.
Kapawi consists of comfortable palapas— aligned along a clear lagoon—with pitched thatch roofs and exposed beams of jungle hardwoods. There are private baths, an excellent restaurant, and a bar stocked with wine and Russian vodka. Environmental touches include solar energy; trash management, and sewage treatment. To minimize its impact, the lodge was built with only 20 units; there are never more than 72 people, including staff, on the premises—about the number of residents in a typical Achuar village.
When we weren't visiting nearby settlements—-slurping chicha (the local brew) and chatting through interpreters with whoever would indulge us—we were sloshing through the flooded forest, looking for wildlife. More than 520 bird species have been spotted in the area, including some seen nowhere else. You also come across monkeys—red howler, night, capuchin, and others—as you walk the trails, and you can hear them near the lodge in the mornings. If you're lucky, you may glimpse capybaras, giant otters, and pink river dolphins swimming in the Capahuari. That still leaves plenty of time to swing in a hammock, pelt mangoes with a blowgun, and play Tarzan on a rope swing over the churning brown currents of the river.

Trading Futures
Kapawi's significance to the Achuar was explained to me hundreds of miles to the northwest in Daniel Koupermarm's crowded little office five stories above the din of Quito's rush-hour traffic. Koupermann had been leading tours into the Amazon for years when he came up with the idea for an Achuar ecolodge. He convinced a tour agency, Canodros S.A., to finance it and was then hired by the company to help promote Kapawi to American and European tourists.
The deal with the Achuar was struck in 1996. Canodros would own and manage the lodge for 15 years, paying the tribe 52,000 a month to lease the land, with annual rent increases of 7.5 percent. Over the lifetime of the agreement, the rent will generate about $600,000 for the tribe.