Top Secrets in South America

When I first visited Rio De Janeiro back in the early '80s, I did all the touristy things my friends and my Fodor's suggested. I checked out Sugar Loaf, that granite plinth that surges like a diva from the jade curtain of the Atlantic. I danced through a pair of flip-flops at Carnaval and at daybreak soothed my feet in the storied sands of Ipanema, under the gaze of the great art-deco Cristo Redentor, blessing us all from the heights of Corcovado.

But Brazil grows on you. Now that I have lived in the country for 26 years, I've come to appreciate that the most rewarding attractions often are not the ones starred in the guidebooks. The best news about Brazil—and much of South America, in fact—is its wealth of quieter, less obvious pleasures. Not all of them cost a fortune; many can be enjoyed for free, or nearly so. Past the heralded beaches and tony resorts, on to where the tire tracks stop and the noise and neon fade, a world of parks, conservation areas and wilderness awaits. And with pocketbooks pinched and nerves frayed, there is no better time to get out and appreciate the great outdoors.

With jungle-clad hills that tumble into the sea and forests spun in a thousand shades of ocher, green and dun, Brazil has a lot to offer the intrepid, the restless or the merely curious. The biggest dilemma is where to start. Brazil can easily induce traveler's overload. The country's national parks alone cover 28,000 kilometers, the size of Portugal and England together. But with a little guidance from this outdoorsy insider, any tourist can revel in the hidden treasures of Brazil—as well as those of its two southerly neighbors, Argentina and Chile.

The Amazon rainforest, with 720 conservation areas—including parks, national forests, and nature preserves—is a wanderer's horn of plenty. Yet for those on a budget, minding the clock or looking for instant gratification, an Amazon excursion can be tiring and frustrating. Instead I recommend the Pantanal, easily the most spectacular wetlands region in the Western Hemisphere, and possibly the world. A system of marshes, lakes and rivers forms an open-air steam bath that sustains an unbelievable concentration of wildlife: the giant anteater, with its tail as feathery as a boa; the electric-blue hyacinth macaw; and the capybara, a hamster on steroids. During the rainy season, from October to February, this landlocked sea covers 210,000 square kilometers. Getting there requires a two-hour flight from Rio or São Paulo, which isn't cheap, or a cross-country bus, which isn't comfortable. But once you're there, the food and lodging are honest and cheap (except at the odd megastar resort), and exploring the filigree of rivers is a bargain. The sights are unequaled.

There are many ways to tackle the Pantanal. I favor renting a car and heading down the Transpantaneira, a dirt track "highway" that is impassable in many stretches. Starting at the edge of Pocone, a tidy cattle town in southern Mato Grosso, this 145-kilometer track is punctuated by 125 precarious wooden bridges, with sylvan theater at every bend. There sits a cortege of majestic white herons, making thrones of trees and fence posts. Here is a brace of jabiru storks, done up like businessmen in their black collars and white tailcoats. Tiptoe out on a wooden bridge and watch the river caiman, South America's smaller cousin to the alligator, as it lies on a stream bottom, maw agape, waiting for lunch to swim by.

It's an old wetlands tradition for cowhands to sit by the campfire at night and tell jaguar tales. Did you hear about the one that dragged a full-grown steer into the swamp? Do you know they eat caimans'' tails? "Ahn, anh, anh" and "Ssssssss!" the cowpokes mimic the jaguar in a wetlands karaoke. How much of this is true and how much fantasy for gringo ears is hard to say. Either way, it only adds to the mythic pull of the Pantanal.

But it's not necessary to go that far. The Tijuca National Forest is a 15-minute cab ride from Ipanema. This 3,200-hectare expanse of dense rainforest, crosshatched by foot trails and waterfalls, may be the only national forest in the world set in the heart of a megacity. Braided by lianas, colonnades of trees with the musical names ipé, ingá and abricó-de-macaco rise 40 meters from the forest floor. Here and there, bright orange and red bromeliads nestle in their crooks. To the untrained eye, it's a pristine millennial forest, but that's an optical illusion. A century and a half ago, Tijuca was an ailing massif. The original Atlantic rainforest that once draped Rio's shoulder had been stripped away for coffee plantations. But with no roots to hold the soil, every rainy season brought calamity, as tons of soil, stone and debris slid down to silt the riverbeds and drown Rio's streets.

It took a future-minded emperor with a soft spot for tropical flora to rescue the city from itself. Dom Pedro II ordered that seeds be taken from tropical plants and trees from all over the world to replant Rio's balding pate, creating one of Latin America's first mass reforestation campaigns. Reinventing Tijuca took 30 years and 100,000 trees. In time, wildlife came back. Now humming birds, wildcats, armadillos and dozens of species of monkeys make their home in the center of the park. Tourists can wander the many footpaths and sit by waterfalls. Here and there, through the dense brush, a glimpse of the stone and steel skyline of Rio pokes through, a jolting reminder of how flimsy the frontier between the sublime and the hectic can be.