Where the Road Ends: A Home in the Brazilian Rainforest »

BINKA LE BRETON runs the Iracambi Rainforest Research Center, lectures and broadcasts internationally on rainforest and human rights topics. She is also president of Amigos de Iracambi, and in her spare time writes books.

The colorful story of one couple’s journey across the world to build their dream home in the heart of the Amazon

In 1989, as their mid-life crises approached, concert pianist Binka Le Breton and her husband Robin, an agricultural economist, decided to uproot themselves from their home in Washington, D.C. and start a new life in Brazil.

Where the Road Ends is their story of building a house, a rainforest research center, and a new dream. Since then, they’ve learned how to work with the trees, the animals, the weather, the local community, and each other. Their technology now ranges from the oxcart to the Internet, and in 2000 they opened a rainforest conservation and research center that is visited by foreign researchers and Brazilian school children.

From meeting their resident cowboy, Albertinho, to beheading snakes, to chauffeuring a local wedding—the adventures described here are unparalleled. This delightful memoir takes the armchair traveler deep into another world where matters of providing food and shelter can never be taken for granted. Binka and Robin have embarked on an adventure that many readers only dream about—transplanting themselves in a different country and learning (often the hard way) what it takes to survive and flourish.

Publishers Weekly

Starred Review.

This book reveals all the enchantment of the rainforest, as well as its mysteries and dangers. The author and her agricultural economist husband moved to Brazil twenty years ago to take over an abandoned farm in a beautiful but remote locale. Le Breton's story the challenges and joys they faced adapting to the community and working to realize their dream of bringing environmental awakening to the region through the establishment of the Iracambi Rainforest Research Center. Her tale has everything, from bandits to insane elections to horribly delayed projects to the artificial insemination of the cows. The cast of characters, colorful in the extreme, includes a squatter cowboy who can fix almost anything, neighbors involved in vendettas, homeless bridegrooms, and women who take sewing seminars in the farmhouse kitchen hoping to make money from the new skills, in spite of the prevailing attitude that a woman's place was in the home. In spite of myriad setbacks, there is tremendous goodwill. "Most Brazilians spent their salary the day they received it, and most shopkeepers put up their prices accordingly. If you were quick off the mark you might find an item in the supermarket going at last week's price, but the supermarket staff tended to be quicker than you were." Le Breton's can-do attitude and successful gerry-rigging makes her an entertaining MacGyver of the jungle.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.