Free Republic

Looking back, I can’t say I wasn’t warned. I’d asked an Indian chief to contact the next village by radio, and heard the threat loud and clear: ‘If the gringo comes here, he’ll be killed.’ It was my Peruvian guide, Cho, who came up with a solution: instead of passing through the hostile village, we’d inflate our rubber rafts and paddle over to a long shingle island. There, I could continue my mission to walk the entire length of the Amazon river, without fear of attack. Which is exactly what we did. Then, at the other end of the island,...

Signs of what could be a previously unknown ancient civilisation are emerging from beneath the felled trees of the Amazon. Some 260 giant avenues, ditches and enclosures have been spotted from the air in a region straddling Brazil's border with Bolivia. The traditional view is that before the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese in the 15th century there were no complex societies in the Amazon basin – in contrast to the Andes further west where the Incas built their cities. Now deforestation, increased air travel and satellite imagery are telling a different story."It's never-ending," says Denise Schaan of the...