Bahia Negra

Getting to Bahía Negra is most of the story. I took the boat — the same cargo-and-passenger vessel that has served this stretch of the upper Paraguay River for decades, a two-day journey north from Concepción through increasingly wild banks of wetland forest, capybara sightings so frequent by the second day that fellow passengers stopped bothering to point them out. The alternative is a small propeller flight, which I’d taken on a previous trip and found nerve-wracking in a different way, watching the endless green of the Pantanal unspool below with no roads visible anywhere for the entire flight.

The town itself, right at Paraguay’s northernmost tip where the country meets Brazil and Bolivia in a loose tangle of borders, is small — a few hundred residents, a military garrison, a handful of stores — but it functions as the gateway to one of the greatest wetland ecosystems on the planet. I hired a local boatman named Wilson, who had grown up navigating these channels and could identify birds by call alone without looking up, to take me into the Río Negro wetlands at dawn, when the mist was still sitting on the water and the wildlife was at its most active — herons, caimans sliding off mudbanks, and at one point a jaguar print in the wet clay of the shore that Wilson identified with the casual authority of someone who saw them regularly.

The isolation here is total in a way I hadn’t experienced elsewhere in Paraguay — no reliable phone signal, electricity that runs on a generator schedule, supplies arriving only as often as the boat does. I spent an evening on the porch of the small guesthouse where I stayed, drinking terere with the owner’s family as the sky went through an extraordinary slow gradient of color, and felt the specific, humbling smallness of being somewhere this far from anywhere else, entirely at the mercy of river and weather.

When to go: May through September is the dry season, giving the most reliable boat and flight access and the best wildlife visibility along the riverbanks and wetland channels.