Peter Allison was a former long-time African safari guide who despised his desk job. So he decided he needed to travel and admire wildlife in South America. First stop was to spend a month volunteering on an animal reserve. He chose to help tend Roy the puma. Sold as a cub, Roy’d never be rewilded so to help keep him as wild as possible, a volunteer ropes himself to Roy and gives him the run of the jungle. It’s absolutely brutal and he became Roy’s chew toy. Then he spends months on many adventures in different countries. The last was living with an Amazon tribe thick in the jungle for 3 weeks. The author is continuously self-deprecating describing his personal misadventures, making this an often laugh-out-loud experience. I enjoyed it very much.

This is not a bad book at all. It's pacy and entertaining and engaging but it suffers from the disadvantage of being preceded by Allison's truly (very) excellent books on safari guiding in Africa. Here Allison is doing a lot more travelling and talking about his experiences which is interesting enough. In many ways it's a mix of narrative and guide book to some extraordinary wildlife experiences throughout South America and would be useful reading as part of developing your own travel plans. Allison is interested in all sorts of animals, and this is by no means just a story about puma's, or indeed his quest to meet the elusive jaguar. In fact his primary obsession appears to be bird watching, but he doesn't let this deflect him from chasing, and presenting to the reader, an almost encyclopedic catalogue of just about everything that walks or swims or slithers across this vast continent.

Allison has a masterful talent for presenting acute observations derived from prolonged observation and carefully developed insights into both animals and humans - particularly that sub-group known as 'tourists'. His first book, 'Whatever You Do, Don't Run' was pure magic from start to finish. But the problem is that in South America he doesn't seem to stay in one place long enough to really 'get inside' the people and animals he is travelling with or travelling to see. There's glimpses of brilliance - and his story of working with a captive puma in the wild is as good as his very best - but overall there's a sense that this is a book about travel rather than about 'place'. Certainly it's still worth looking at, particularly if you are considering travel to South America, or have a general interest in wildlife there. But it would be an unfortunate introduction to Allison's writing, and in some ways it's a disappointing sequel to his earlier work. But that is only because those African stories are done so brilliantly and are so difficult to equal. They are worth making an effort to add to your library. As indeed might any of Allison's future work - hopefully something written from a less frenetic perspective, but rather one that allows his sympathy for the slow and very complex patterns of nature to shine through. ( )

I liked this but not as much as I liked the earlier ones about him being a guide in Botswana. ( )

Peter Allison came to Africa for his gap year and stayed for seven, working as a guide in safari operations, but as catering to tourists took its toll on him, he returned to his native Australia for a desk job. However, almost a decade later he couldn’t stand the boredom any longer and left for South America, another continent with enough wild places left, where he spent the next year and a half visiting various locales which he hoped would have enough wildness and danger to make him feel alive again.

He started with a month of volunteering at a Bolivian nature reserve Parque Machia which takes in wild animals orphaned, mistreated or surrendered by people, takes care of them, and if possible rehabilitates them to their natural habitat. True to his double mission to do his best to help animals and to seek out adrenaline-rising experiences, Allison volunteered to daily walk a puma known for biting its caretakers when excited, such as when taken for a walk. Even more dangerously, the puma’s leash was tied to Allison’s waist, to prevent another escape, after the first one had ended with a human killed, and so Allison had to keep up with his charge’s running speed in order to remain upright.

In subsequent months the author undertook an excursion to a glacier, a sojourn in the Brazilian wetland region called the Pantanal, a high altitude trip in the Andes, a cruise down a tributary of the Amazon on a bamboo raft on tire tubes (just getting to the starting point was a hair-rising adventure), a trip to Chingaza National Park in Colombia open only by special permission, a stay in a safari lodge in Ecuador where he’d been invited as a consultant, and a sojourn with an Amazonian Indian tribe who still live the traditional way, but try to develop eco-tourism while killing off oil workers. Ironically, even when Allison went to stay with his friends in Santiago for a brief break in civilization, he was woken up by an earthquake.

I’ve found this book to be as interesting, highly humorous and hard to put down as Allison’s first two books (about his experiences in Africa). It really gives a sense of the places he visited, and his love for animals and commitment to conservation is really moving, without being in the least dogmatic.

Another attractive feature of this book is the author’s invariably upbeat attitude in the face of trying or dangerous circumstances. Amazingly, even after he contacted some infection by the end of his trip, he managed to enjoy his stay in the jungle, describing it as blissfully happy and serene and regretting having to leave the place, despite being burned by a recurring fever, fainting once, and having to swim across the river for his life while on the verge of another fainting spell. Equally telling, although he willingly put up with animal attacks, dangerous drivers, ill-health and earthquakes, he couldn’t suffer tourists gladly. Even when a tourist was merely anxious because she didn’t see the bird the guide was pointing out, or when another tourist asked the guide a perfectly natural question about why the glacial ice is of such a vivid blue color, Allison felt irritated. Thus he found himself in a situation where he was unable to endure a regular city life and equally unable to endure guiding tourists, as he’d hoped he might be able to do after a long break. Luckily for him, by the end of his "vacation" he got a job offer from a conservation organization that involved a lot of travel to wild areas. Personally, I was curious to know more about his new job, but for some reason he doesn’t elaborate on it, not even naming the organization he now works for either in the book or in his online blog.

Allison mentions that at the time of his stay Parque Machia’s existence was threatened by a new road being built through it by the cocaine industry supported by the mayor of the nearby town. So after reading this book, I checked the reserve’s website and found out that "after only 30 days (after being built) the road was impassable due to landslides, and so CIWY (the organization which runs the reserve) is working to rebuild the damage and continue to offer the animals the best lives possible." So apparently the reserve has survived, due to difficult natural conditions or poor road building techniques. (The website claims that the road was to service remote communities, but nothing is to signify that these aren’t remote communities of cocaine growers, as Allison claims.)

He also writes about the calcium deficiency problems suffered by the puma he was walking whom he, with a number of other volunteers and staff members, had to take to a human hospital for an X-ray. The reserve’s website says that "despite being treated by the vets, Parque Machia’s steep terrain exacerbated Roy’s (the puma’s) condition and so he was moved to Ambue Ari (another reserve run by the same organization), where the land is much flatter. Roy is currently doing well in Ambue Ari and his condition has greatly improved." So there seems to be a happy ending on that front as well. Also of interest, the website says that Roy "was named after a New Zealand volunteer who, at the beginning of his round-the-world trip, came to the refuge to volunteer for a couple weeks, and left a year later to catch his flight home! Roy grew quickly and became the strongest and fastest puma in Parque Machia, known as ‘The Running Machine,’ accomplishing in a day three to four times that of the other cats." ( )