PHOTOS HERE!!
Update #2 Land Search September 6, 2004
We are now in La Paz, Bolivia. We arrived a few days ago after spending the last month and a half in Northern Bolivia looking for land. We are quite excited to be back in a big city with email, phones, movies, plays, discos and vegetarian restaurants. However it is quite a lot faster than the small towns up north and we know we will be excited to return in a few weeks.
The first weeks after we arrived in Northern Bolivia we were slightly lost and did not know where to begin looking. We started by asking taxi drivers, hotel owners, street vendors and basically anyone who would talk to us if they knew anyone selling land. We talked to mayors and organizations in each town or community we went to. We got tons of leads and at first were extremely excited with each one, but we soon realized how things worked and many of the land leads were not as perfect as they sounded. We learned there are three types of land: privately owned land, government owned land and community owned land, and though we can work with local government and communities on their land, the only land that we can legally buy is privately owned land. This was a bit hard to find out; some days we felt extremely optimistic seeing the potential of the land and Esperanza de Libertad and other days we were hot and tired and bored and wondered what we were getting ourselves into.
We want land that is far enough from people that we can allow the animals to live free rather than in cages but close enough to a town that we can have access to the outside world. After looking at many areas in Northern Bolivia we narrowed our search to land near Ixiamas, a small town in the heart of the jungle 20 hours north of La Paz. It is 3 hours north of Rurrenabaque, a town that attracts thousands of tourists a year and has email access and an airport with short flights to all major Bolivian cities. Ixiamas has telephones, a hospital and a lot of potential for investigations in the animal trade, education campaigns and ecotourism.
We have several pieces of land we are interested in. None of them are certain but we really hope that one of them works out. Our first choice is 30 minutes from Ixiamas, 240 acres with a river and the potential of buying up to 1440 acres of the surrounding land as soon as we raise enough money. We heard howler monkeys on the land. Our second and more likely choice is 120 acres lot 45 minutes from Ixiamas. It has all the legal papers, it has water, 25 acres have been cut and the rest is jungle. The lots on either side are privately owned and their owners are not working or living on the land. 120 acres is enough to start but the hope would be to raise more money and contact the neighboring lots and make offers for their land.
We are in the process of working with Patricia Costa, Esperanza de Libertad's lawyer, to check on the paperwork of our land leads and to find out exactly what we have to do to buy the land. We will head back to northern Bolivia as soon as we can. Once the final decision has been made, Patricia will join us in Ixiamas to help us finalize the paperwork. From there we will put up No Hunting signs on the land as well as work on the construction plans. We would like to have someone move onto the land as soon as possible but until we work out a house and transportation it is going to be difficult.
One of the hardest parts of travel in this area was the lack of transportation. We spent hours and often days waiting for cars, buses, motorcycles, pickups, jeeps, logging trucks or any other type of transportation to pass by and bring us to or from land we were looking at. Finding someone that we could hire to drive us to land was hard and very expensive. Before we can begin construction we need to buy a pick-up. We found a used pick-up for sale for $4000 and are really hoping to begin raising money to buy it or another as soon as possible. We will let you all know when we have land.
Con mucho cariņo de Bolivia,
Stella Sythe
Esperanza de Libertad Project Coordinator USA
Franci Pairo
Esperanza de Libertad Project Coordinator Bolivia
Esperanza de Libertad is a Bolivian foundation dedicated to forming an animal sanctuary in Northern Bolivia. Our current project is to buy land in Bolivia. If you would like to receive emails with the latest news about Esperanza de Libertad please go to http://lists.riseup.net/www/subrequest/esperanza_de_libertad and sign up.
