Excerpted from the article:

The Romance of The Hacienda Hideaway
Three Luxurious Guest Ranches -- in Mexico, Venezuela and Argentina-- Define Gracious Hospitality in Rural Surroundings

by: Jonathan Kandell

... If the Yucatan landscape is pockmarked with evidence of successive waves of human settlement, the grassy savanna of central Venezuela, known as the llanos, offers that rare example of a wilderness largely able to blunt human efforts to conquer it.

This is a land of extremes. For six months a year, torrential rains turn most of this Texas-sized region into vast lakes and bloated rivers. Monkeys, ocelots, fox and anteaters flee to dry patches of higher, wooded ground. Infested with crocodile-like caimans, the waters lap over dirt roads, and boats become the only form of transportation. Then from December to May, the llanos are scourged by drought. The savanna grasses turn parched yellow. Vehicles stir up a choking red dust. Mammals, reptiles, amphibians and birds in huge numbers congregate around the shrinking water holes. And the llanos become the New World equivalent of Africa's Serengeti Plain.

The best vantage point to enjoy this cornucopia of wildlife is a stay at Hato Piņero. A Hato is what Venezuelans call a cattle ranch. Historically, it took an unusually large ranch to hold enough water supplies to survive the long droughts and enough high pastures to feed cattle during the prolonged floods. Hato Piņero, an estate of about 200,000 acres, is one of the biggest ranches in the llanos.

Piņero is run by Antonio Julio Branger, who owns the hato with siblings. Now in his mid-70s, Branger came relatively late in life to conservationist cause. As a young man, he would fly friends into the ranch every weekend to shoot everything in sight-- pumas, caimans deer, game birds. But as the wildlife dwindled, the joy of the llanos vanished for him. So, beginning close to 50 years ago, he prohibited hunting on the property. Within a few years, even the most endangered species, such as jaguars and tapirs, had made dramatic comeback. Branger invited zoologists and botanists to visit, and later established a biological research station for them at the ranch. By 1980, Piņero had become an early outpost of ecotourism. Birders came from United States and Europe, followed by other amateur naturalists, by word-of-mouth. The numbers rose so sharply that a dozen years ago, Branger decided to build a guest house next to his ranch house. The building has mauve-colored outer walls and red-tile roofs, the rooms have overhead fans and stone floors. There is no hot water; it is not needed in this searing heat. The cooking is simple, tasty and typical of llanos: shredded beef, fried yucca and plantains, and baked piranha the most abundant local fish.

On my visit, there are a score of guests divided into two tour group one from the United States, the other from the Netherlands-united only by their deep love of birding. Not speaking Dutch, I am drawn to my compatriots. They range from a septuagenarian couple (he a retired doctor, she a former lawyer) to a young Omaha couple, both of them high school teachers. But they speak the language of advanced ornithology ("Was that a greater or lesser yellow legs?" "That was my first hoatzin!")

There is only a glimmer of dawn when I step into the courtyard of the guest house with the ranch resident naturalist. He identifies the sounds of the first birds to stir: the taro-taro-tam of a sharp-tailed ibis the chocorocoee-chocorocoee of a stripe-backed wren, and then the splitting, raucous call of scarlet macaws. On the dirt road a hundred yards ahead, the llaneros, or cowboys, are already riding toward the pastures. Scampering out of their way is a surprised pack of pig-size capybaras, the world's largest rodents. A jaguar's cough sets off a chorus of bellows from the cattle that stretch out into the horizon. Along with a dozen birders, I board a flatbed truck with cushioned side-benches and a canvas roof for an early morning excursion led by a bearded, pot- bellied ornithologist from a Texas-based bird-watching agency. He is a stern guide. "Why are you photographing caimans when a dozen striated herons are standing by?" he scolded one couple aiming their cameras at a riverbank. He is loaded down with seriously advanced recording equipment to capture the songs of the rarer species. We pass two entwined an anacondas, an act of copulation that can last for 48 hours, according to Piņero's naturalist, who is sitting next to me. In the field egrets and yellow-headed caracaras straddle the backs of the cattle combing their hides for ticks and fleas.

Our primary destination is a lake shrunk by the drought. Desperate for water, the plethora of wildlife are trusting, of each other and even of us humans. Howling monkeys descend from the near trees. Caimans by the hundreds lie on the water's edge, oblivious to the capybara and scarlet ibises stepping inches from their snouts. family of 4-foot-tall jabiruses, the most massive of the storks, wades past a flock of roseate spoonbills, sweeping the shallows with their flat beaks. My companions, standing only 20 to 30 feet away, can't believe the birds don't scatter in fright.

By noon we have counted more than 50 bird species. Even our Texan taskmaster, who has enough feathered arias for a New Age opera, doesn't object when the local naturalist orders a few unscheduled stops to show us some oddities of the llanos on our way back to the ranch compound. He points out a pond that seems to have been brought to a boil. The water's oxygen levels have dropped so low that the still-abundant fish forsake gills in favor of primitive lungs and poke their mouths through the surface to gulp for air-thus, the bubbling effect.

Just as startling are large cocoon-like growths in a tree cavity. Each is a hibernating frog that, in order to survive the drought, has emitted secretions that harden around it like an insect pupa to reduce its body's water loss. At the feel of the first raindrops of the wet season, the naturalist explains, the frogs break out of these shells and resume their feeding

Back at the ranch house over lunch, the birders swap stories about their most satisfying expeditions around the world and agree that Piņero rates near the top of their list. Then they argue whether caimans and piranhas are dangerous to humans-- a discussion that I have noticed always breaks out among visitors to the South American tropics. This time, at least, the question is settled by the wife of a Dutch diplomat, who informs us that she fell off her horse while crossing a river that morning. Caimans by the score fled to the banks before the llaneros could reach her-- and the piranhas also seemed to have swum away in a panic.

Reprinted from the Los Angeles Times Magazine, September 13, 1998