For my National Geographic expedition, I spent years scanning Google Earth and devouring fly fishing Instagram feeds in the hunt for the perfect river baseline. I was looking for a place that nobody had ever heard of, a place completely off the beaten track. I wanted to know what a healthy Amazon River, free of any human intervention, really looks like. And to my amazement, I found it.
Nestled within Isiboro Sécure National Park, where the Andean foothills meet the lowland rainforest, are the headwaters of the Sécure River or – as I like to call it – the hidden headwaters. The lowlands are inhabited, they are the homelands of the Tsimane, Mojeño-Trinitario and Yuracaré indigenous groups who have hunted and fished there for millennia. The waters here are beautiful but it was only after talking with the locals that we realised how close we were to somewhere unlike anywhere else on Earth. A place up in the mountains, free from the effects of fishing and hunting. So secluded that in all of living memory it had managed to stay entirely untouched by human life.
The river is completely unreachable by foot or canal. Your only hope is by helicopter and I was lucky enough to have Marcelo Pérez, an Argentine fly fisherman who took me around. There’s obviously no guidebook so it was all very intuitive: ‘Oh, that pool looks kind of interesting, let’s pop down.’
Once down there, it is an experience like no other. I’ve seen a lot of cool and amazing things in my 25 years of exploration, but that place completely blew my mind. The sheer abundance of fish life, the richness of the river, the tameness of the animals. We had tapirs sniffing our feet, uncharacteristically curious because they’d never seen a human before. I was diving with catfish the size of refrigerators, six of them. There were schools of pacu fish in the hundreds, so dense they blocked out the sun. I spent a month there, the first to explore the waters, which I believe are the last of their kind.
You don’t need to visit an uninhabited corner of the Amazon to experience nature’s wonder. Start where you are – seek out the rivers, forests and wildlife nearby, remind yourself how lucky we are to live among such natural beauty. Just be mindful that you don’t love a place to death.
Interview by Farah Thorndycraft
