Occupying 16,000 square kilometres of Bolivia's far northeast, on the border with Brazil, PARQUE NACIONAL NOEL KEMPFF MERCADO is the most isolated, pristine and spectacular national park in the country, and one of the most remote wilderness regions in all South America. Encompassing a range of different ecosystems including different types of Amazon rainforest, dry and seasonally inundated savannah, and scrubby Brazilian cerrado, the park supports an astonishing range and abundance of wildlife, including over 630 species of birds (among them twenty different types of parrot and seven of macaw), as well as multicoloured tanagers and toucans, and such rarities as the mighty harpy eagle. In addition, eleven species of monkey inhabit the park, and all the major Amazonian mammals – including jaguar, tapir, peccary, deer, giant anteater and armadillo – roam its forests and savannahs, while its rivers and lakes are home to abundant pink freshwater dolphins and the highly endangered giant river otter. Of course, most of these species are also present in many of Bolivia's other national parks; the difference is that Noel Kempff Mercado is so comparatively undisturbed by human activity that your chances of actually seeing all these different animals are much higher here than anywhere else in the country.

The park's most remarkable natural feature is the Huanchaca plateau (also known as the Caparú Plateau), a vast sandstone meseta which rises 500m above the surrounding rainforest to an elevated plain of grasslands and dry cerrado woodlands, from where spectacular waterfalls plunge down the sheer escarpment into the park's rivers. This isolated plateau covers over seven thousand square kilometres, or a bit under half the park, and provided the inspiration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Lost World – at least according to Colonel Percy Harrison Faucett, the legendary British explorer who was the first European to see the plateau when he came here in 1910 while demarcating Bolivia's borders, and who later described the landscape to Conan Doyle in London. The park was first established in 1979 as the Parque Nacional Huanchaca, but was renamed in 1988 (when it was also expanded) in honour of the pioneering Bolivian biologist and conservationist Noel Kempff Mercado, who was murdered here by drug traffickers after stumbling across a secret cocaine laboratory high on the Huanchaca plateau.

The park was expanded again in 1997 under a pioneering "carbon credit" scheme, whereby two US energy corporations and the oil giant BP paid around $10 million to buy out loggers operating in an adjacent forest area of 6340 square kilometres, which was then added to the park – this allows the corporations to claim credits for the carbon dioxide which the rescued trees will absorb towards their targets for reducing emissions under the international Kyoto treaty – which expires in 2012 – on global warming. As yet, this is the biggest such carbon-credit project in the world, but the fact that the US government continues to show rather lukewarm support for the treaty and discussion of what will replace it, means that its future remains uncertain. For more recent developments on the project, go to www.nature.org.