Annai, a large village of 700 with dwellings of wattle-and-daub and thatched palm, is on one side of the strip, and Colin's Rock View Lodge is on the other. We head to the kitchen, inside a ramshackle two-story stucco ranch house in a grove of mango trees, and settle in. Colin came to South America 30 years ago as a volunteer for the U.K.'s version of the Peace Corps, the VSO, and never left. Fluent in Portuguese from his years in Brazil, he has worked as an agronomist, a gold miner and a construction engineer (on contract, he helped build the airstrip at Jonestown for the cult that later perished in Jim Jones' Kool-Aid massacre).

Now, by leasing this 20-acre ranch, he is trying his hand at ecotourism. "It is a pet hobby that brings together everything I have come to love about the place," explains Colin. "The culture, the art, the frontier. I do a few hires with the Bedford (four-wheel-drive) truck and Land Rover, run the Dakota bar next door and am also the agent for the airline that flew you here."

I sit on a bench behind a long wooden table full of pitchers of coconut milk, passion fruit juice and hot Brazilian coffee. Here, I meet Velda, Colin's Mikushi wife, three of his eight kids and Shawndell, Velda's 21-year-old younger sister. Shawndell, a quiet beauty in braids, looks as if she stepped out of an old Mathew Brady Indian portrait. While Shawndell helps serve, the line between employee and relative is blurred. We feast on platters of eggs, pancakes, wild cucumbers, rice and hot bread just taken from a clay kiln in the corner of the room. By the time we are finished, most of Colin's great extended family has either joined us at the table or passed through with a friendly greeting.

Wooden shutters and doors are thrown open, and outside in the golden morning light, I can see a portion of the lush orchard -- cashew, lemon, guava and almond trees -- and garden that feed family and guests. Fenced enclosures nearby hold local critters -- orphaned or injured -- that are being nursed to health: a giant anteater, a Brazilian tapir, capybaras and spider monkeys. While most guests so far have been scientists going to and from nearby Iwokrama, Colin is optimistic that those few hardy tourists who enjoy tropical wilderness and solitude will eventually find their way here. But only a few. "I am concerned it doesn't get out of hand," he says. "There is something peculiar and wonderful about it here -- a certain easy rapport. We would like to keep it that way."

Tomorrow, we will travel to Surama, a smaller village at the edge of the rain forest and, from there, will venture up the wild Burro Burro River in a wooden longboat with local Mikushi as guides. In preparation, I join Colin in the living room, where he is eager to show me his collection of vintage travel-adventure books from the last century, recounting astonishing exploits of the Brits who first ventured into what they knew then as "the Guianas."

On the walls, there is the skin of a 12-foot-long anaconda -- "a small one," says Colin -- artistically incised calabash gourds, self-entwining Amerindian sculptures from the latex of the bulletwood tree, a small rack of bush deer antlers, the basketlike nest of an orapendula bird. A chameleon clamps to one wall on suckered feet; a swallow zooms overhead. In the corner is a large green-felt-covered card table, where in the evenings one can sit in a chair of woven liana and wood with a cold Banks beer and a plate of homegrown peanuts and have real conversation -- for that is what one does in such a place as the low-voltage lights dim and brighten at the whim of the jerry-rigged generator.

"This is fascinating!" says Colin, effusively pulling "Waterton's Wanderings in South America" from a shelf and thumbing through its yellowed pages. "In 1812, the explorer Charles Waterman came here and wrote of Surama. It was famous in the region, along with Annai, for the excellent poison it made -- curare. They tipped their arrows and spears with it, still do, and go into the bush and hunt anything that moves ... . You know, there's so much about this place that hasn't changed."

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Morning comes with the distant scream of monkeys. I jolt awake inside the mosquito net canopy over my bed. The generators are off and a mild breeze wafts through the windows, with no glass or screen to obstruct it. From inside the netting, reality seems gauzy, diffuse. I can smell coffee and warm bread from the nearby kitchen.

After breakfast, we load into a battered, mud-splattered Land Rover, orange foam bursting out of the dashboard, for the hour-and-a-half trip to Surama, traveling over a red clay strip known only as the Road. The Road is a failed attempt by the Brazilian government to build a highway from its interior, through Guyana to the Caribbean ports. You can reach Georgetown, 200 miles away, in 12 hours over the Road from here, but only in the dry weather. With two wet seasons -- a long one in the winter-spring and a shorter one, the Cashew Rains, in the summer -- the Road is often a quagmire. "You can go halfway by vehicle and halfway by dugout then," explains Colin, ever enthusiastic.

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