The Destinations of a Lifetime

Excerpt from National Geographic Adventure
by McKenzie Funck

Looking for a memorable eco-adventure? Two Conservancy projects were named to National Geographic Adventure magazine's top 25 trips for 2005.

The Mosquito Coast By Wooden Boat
Honduras
The Rio Plátano Biosphere Reserve on Honduras’s Mosquito Coast is a global wilderness icon, the centerpiece of a two-million-acre corridor of protected wetlands and tropical forest. It is also, however, an ecosystem imperiled: This year UNESCO threatened to strip it of its World Heritage status due to illegal hunting, encroaching cattle farmers, and hardwood logging. “The Honduran government just doesn’t have the financial or human resources to manage such a huge area,” says Sandra Mendoza, regional head of the Nature Conservancy. Mendoza and others are working to turn a “paper park” into something more tangible. As part of their work, dozens of locals are being trained as park guards and a network of guest houses and nature trails is being created in indigenous villages.

A new trip by Emerald Planet showcases these efforts. First by motorized canoe, then by pipantes (wooden dugouts push-poled upstream by Pech or Miskito Indian guides), you’ll travel from the Caribbean up the muddy Rio Plátano. Peccaries and tapirs hide in the jungle, and you may see white ibis, blue-crowned motmots, and great green macaws—just a few of the region’s more than 400 bird species. You’ll spend two nights in thatched-roof cabins in the village of Las Marias and visit the Maya ruins of Copan and the Cuero y Salado Wildlife Refuge, where alligators and manatees swim in the estuaries. For every traveler who signs up, $300 is donated to the Nature Conservancy.

$2,998 for ten days
888-883-0736
www.emeraldplanet.com.

Going Pro on the Yangtze’s Great Bend
Chýna
This winter, a group of fledgling Chinese river guides will practice flip drills, rowing, and rescues in the Class I–II rapids of the Upper Yangtze. Then, come February, they’ll join a Mountain Travel Sobek trip down the river’s Class IV Great Bend—as fellow paddlers, thankfully, not yet captains. Sobek, with the help of the Nature Conservancy, is training these guides as part of a wide-ranging effort to shift the local economy from logging to sustainable industries such as ecotourism. The province of Yunnan, which abuts the Tibetan Plateau in China’s humid south, is one of the world’s richest biological hot spots, filled with medicinal plants, pandas, golden monkeys, and snow leopards. Four of Asia’s great rivers—the Yangtze, Mekong, Salween, and Irrawaddy—flow within 55 miles of each other; hill-tribe villages are populated by the matriarchal Naxi and other minorities. Rafting the Great Bend, a U-turn in a 10,000-foot-deep gorge with a dozen long Class IV rapids, is no doubt the most exciting way to see the region. Ten percent of the trip fee goes to the Nature Conservancy.

$3,890 for 16 days
888-687-6235
www.mtsobek.com