Tsimane’s river system is divided into beats, with a pair of anglers and three guides fishing each beat each day. There’s also Wi-Fi, outstanding food and daily laundry service. The beds are comfortable, and there’s all the hot water you could ask for. The temperature cools as soon as the sun sets, so there is no need for air conditioning. Electricity is provided between 6 and 10 a.m., and again from 6 p.m. The team used native labor and materials to construct a lodge with four double- occupancy rooms, a generator and solar power. Tsimane had three months to relocate and rebuild before the 2015 season began that June, and Untamed Angling did it in just 60 days. In February 2015 floodwaters turned the river into a 45-foot torrent, destroying the lodge. Tsimane Lodge, initially, was farther upstream, at the convergence of the Pluma and Secure rivers. From there the lodge was a 90-minute trip up the Secure River in a native-made, 20-plus-foot canoe with a long-shaft engine. We landed on a strip carved out of the jungle, next to the Oromomo Indian village. The next morning the agent drove us to the airport, where we boarded a small plane that flew us about 225 miles into the Bolivian jungle. The first leg of our trip required us to fly to Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, where a Tsimane agent met us and brought us to the first-class Camino Real Hotel for the night. We each had one bite out of several hundred casts, but we both landed a dorado in the 15-pound range within the first two hours of our bucket-list trip, so we were pretty stoked with a week of jungle fishing ahead of us. Then Chris hooked up to 15 pounds of yellow magic. Cast after cast produced nada, but I figured the practice of throwing oversize flies was good for both of us. Some debris was along the far bank, but there were no visible signs of life, so we began casting. It was deeper than expected, so Chris used an intermediate line, and I dug out a huge black fly with lead eyes. We moved downstream just a bit, to a deeper, slower pool that looked as if it might hold some fish. My friend Chris and I had arrived at Tsimane Lodge in Bolivia, unpacked our tackle and walked down to the “home pool” to see whether we could dredge up a dorado on our own before dinner. I had just beached Chris Lalli’s first golden dorado on a fly. I was in a river in an indigenous native territory where the Amazon jungle meets the Andes Mountains.
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