On my first night in Rio Branco, I asked a young cab driver to take me to the best nightclub in town. Without hesitation he drove straight into the rainforest.
Soon we were surrounded in darkness, the car's headlights barely illuminating the lush greenery by the side of the road. After 10 miles, we turned left down a track. At the end was a simple house with its own swimming pool and a dozen prostitutes. I climbed the wooden stairwell and found there were rooms upstairs that could be rented by the hour. What struck me was neither the openness of the operation nor the boredom on the girls faces, but the pride of the taxi-driver in showing me this exclusive den and his uncontroversial assumption that any visitor wanting to go out for a drink would be looking, inevitably, for hookers.
They all come here. Rio Branco is the most inaccessible of the Amazon's jungle cities. It is the capital of Acre, Brazil's most westerly state, squeezed into a buttock-shaped nook by the borders of Bolivia and Peru. The international image of the Amazon is of a romantic green wilderness, fraying at the edges where loggers are chopping down trees. This is only half true. Over the last two decades the Brazilian Amazon has witnessed an immigration boom that has seen its population more than triple to 19m.
In , Rio Branco had 36, inhabitants. Now it is an ugly brown sprawl, home to over a quarter of a million. Its expansion has been faster than it could reasonably be expected to cope with, and the jungle city suffers from severe urban problems.
The dream of achieving fortune in Brazil's western frontier which leads so many people to head for the city turns into a reality for very few. Crime levels are high and so endemic that a local MP was jailed recently for cutting off a man's limbs with a chainsaw.
