Am I alone in being surprised that, when googlemaps shows the colour of the cars parked outside my house, there are tribes living in the Amazon which have yet to be touched by the outside world?
Jose Carlos dos Reis Meirelles, a Brazilian government expert, says the aerial photos were taken to prove to doubters that the community existed, and to warn of the impending threat of logging.
The closest settlement to the tribe's village is Envira, in Brazil's western Acre province. If you look at it on googlemaps, the jungle appears to be untouched.
But look closer and you'll see gaps in the forest. Scan south following the BR364 and you arrive at Rio Branco, a steaming riverside city with a university and international airport. Like other large Amazon settlements, it seems incongruous as it looms out of what's left of the jungle.
The human death and suffering involved in the opening up of such cities, much of it by railway builders during the rubber boom of the late 19th and early 20th century, is legendary.
A century on and Rio Branco probably feels relatively familiar to people used to university towns, certainly by comparison with many of the frontier settlements in the area.
My lasting memory from when I was in that part of Brazil in 2002, however, was of the smoke in the air, mile after mile, as I took the bus along the BR317 to the Peruvian border (as the above photo from the bus shows). The threat of the logging industry to the few uncontacted communities that Meirelles warns of is very real.
