Tyler Sawyer and Huck Micah

I apologize for the length of this post, as it grew from a short narrative into roughly half the size of On The Road (although nowhere near as good). In excusing my verbosity, keep in mind that the following post covers a period of almost 3 weeks, and quite probably the most amazing adventure I've ever had. Hope you enjoy it.

After our long and tiring trek through the high Andes around Cusco, it was quite wonderful to get back to Cusco and spend a couple of days in a doctor's office trying to find out why I felt like death. As mentioned in previous posts, it turns out that the cause of my illness was in fact two entirely different varieties of parasitic bacteria, the revelation of which by the pretty female Peruvian doctor in her office caused me to burst out laughing (which also served to cause the young and even prettier female American medical intern who had been trying to hold in her sniggers to dissolve laughing as well). It isn't every day that your diagnosis includes both Giardia and Salmonella (the Typhoid-causing kind!). So, loaded down with one packet for the Giardia containing the largest pills I have ever seen in my entire life (at least the largest pills intended to go in and down, rather than up and in), and another bottle containing roughly 15 days worth of high-powered antibiotics designed to kill the Salmonella and anything else it found in its bloodthirsty killing rampage through my body, I headed back to my hostel to see how the plans for our next adventure were shaping up.

During my absence from anything approaching normal, non-diarrhea-spraying life, Tyler, Simon, and Craig had been meeting with Kat to plan our upcoming river trip/expedition/insanity. The idea and impetus for the trip came from the aforementioned Kat, a 19-soon-to-be-20 year old British girl who was living in Cusco, spending time with her boyfriend (Steve, who writes the Peruvian edition of the Footprints travel guides) and coming up with crazy schemes to try and drown foolishly trusting, naive American boys.

The plan as it stood was fiendish in its simplicity: we would head to a small town far out in the Amazon jungle of Peru, the farthest we could reach by bus, and from there make our way downriver on the Urabamba as it meanders north to become the Ukalali, which is one of the two major tributaries of the Amazon river. Our method of transport was as yet to be determined, but the idea was to build a big raft out of balsa wood and float all the way down, camping in the jungle on the banks along the way. The idea, ambitious to say the least, was not pulled entirely out of Kat's derriere from nothing. It seems that previously she had attempted a similar trip on another remote Amazon jungle river with a friend of hers, getting as far as actually building the raft and floating for two days before they wrecked in some rapids, destroying their craft, and had to flag down locals in their small craft to get back out. But, never one to give up, she was more than willing to give it a go with a new set of volunteers as her previous partner refused to ever try something so stupid again.

Making us somewhat more confident about our chances for survival were the other two members of our elite river-tackling squad, Simon and Craig. Simon, who as Tyler mentioned previously has spent many years as a guide in Australia, is in fact an avid kayaker and has worked a number of seasons as a guide for river raft trips as well. Craig, also an experienced guide in many outdoor activities if not specifically rafting, had done other trips down rivers in other parts of the world as well, so he wasn't completely useless either. So, armed with their know-how and our rough guesses as to what we'd face, we set about provisioning for the trip.

First and foremost was food. We figured we could re-provision on the way, so we bought enough for 10 days out, mainly items such as rice and pastas which we hoped to combine with fruits and vegetables purchased from the occasional communities along the banks. Next, we each bought a 5-gallon bucket with a securely sealing lid to keep all the food (and small valuables) dry in, and a bunch of large plastic bags to waterproof the gear in our backpacks as much as possible. Next, and most important, were the machetes. We figured we should probably have at least 4, so we bought a variety of lengths and spent a couple of hours brandishing them around the hostel. Other items we figured were awesome to buy included roughly 50m of strong rope, a ridiculously big tarp, some various pots and dishes, and two big bottles of rum.

So finally, 5 paragraphs into the post, we left Cusco on a 10-hour busride back to Quillabamba (from whence we had just come), and arranged another bus the next evening to head to Ivachote (the last reachable town in the jungle by road). There were some more items we needed to buy so we spent the next day doing that (as well as having a local seamstress-er (what's the masculine of seamstress?) make us some badass sheaths for our machetes out of a pair of Tyler's jeans that I stole). That evening, we boarded the bus for a 12-hour ride through the dark jungle, stopping twice along the way to fix the transmission (accomplished by opening a panel in the floor of the bus to get at the still spinning shafts and gears, and jamming a wrench down inside to either actually turn some nut or bolt, or possibly just to bang on whatever was reachable to beat the transmission into submission, it was hard to tell from the noises and curses). Either way, after a nighttime ride which must have been driven by Mr. Toad, we arrived at daylight in Ivachote. (Or rather, we arrived at the point where the road ended at the river, across which a long footbridge led us into the town itself).

Ivachote is a small community, with a hotel and two restaurants, of no real consequence except as our starting point. The town is situated on the Urabamba a short distance upriver from the mouth of the Pongo Canyon. The river dives between the canyon's steep, jungle-covered sides for a few kilometers of narrow, rapid-filled water. We weren't sure whether it was too dangerous on home-made rafts, so we made arrangements for a boat heading downriver with some men going fishing for a few days to take us through the canyon and drop us at the other side, where they said there was a house and someone who could help us build our rafts. This is the mouth of the canyon, as we prepare to enter:




The ride was incredible, as I've rarely seen such beatiful scenery. Despite the fact that we were passing through in the dry season, the walls of the canyon were covered with small waterfalls and streams coursing over rocks to join the Urabamba. The trees and jungle themselves dripped water, and we got the impression that things would only be more incredibly moist in the wet season.

Some photos of the canyon:






We came out of the canyon a bare couple of hours after we started, and our boat pulled up on the bank a short distance downstream. They told us that here we could find help building our rafts (were they laughing at us?), at the small casa located up the bank. The river here was bordered by a large red clay beach, which met the base of a small forested cliff with stairs leading up to the bluff only 20m or so above. We walked up the stairs and found a fairly large open dirt area, with two fairly large buildings at the back of it. One was fully enclosed, with a number of rooms evident from the doors fronting onto the porch which faced us. The other was more of a gazebo, large and thatch-roofed, with a cement floor and low fence surrounding it but open to the air. Inside it was divided into two rooms, the larger holding a picnic table and nothing else, the smaller more enclosed and housing the kitchen. We met the caretakers, a young couple who lived there and looked after the place for the owners, who apparently lived somewhere else. They told us we could set up camp in the large open building, on the floor of which we could place our sleeping mats and from the ceiling hang our mosquito nets. That afternoon we were wrecked from the all-night busride of the night before, so we all took naps in the afternoon heat, rousing ourselves later to take a short walk in the jungle around the place in the evening before returning to sit at the picnic table in the dim light from a kerosene-fueled candle and eat dinner while listening to the buzz of insects in the jungle night outside.

The next morning we rose fairly early and decided to go for a walk in the jungle, up the river a ways. We'd found out from the couple (and also from seeing them littering the banks), that the locals built rafts out of balsa logs and used them to go downriver, then simply left them along the banks and caught public boats with motors back up. Our plan was to find some of these discarded rafts and use them as a basis for our raft, perhaps by strapping a bunch of them together. We had a lot of ideas, but needed to actually float a couple of the rafts to see what would work best. So, we strapped on our machetes, and needlessly hacking a few branches that were kind of close to the fairly well-worn trail up the bank, we set off on a reconnaisance mission. After a ways, we descended to the beach and poked around, getting an idea what sorts of rafts were available. The rafts all consisted of 4-6 balsa wood logs (ranging from 4-10 inches in diameter), fixed together into 15-20ft long, narrow rafts by long, harder wood spikes driven laterally through the logs at 2 or 3 places along their length. There were plenty of them strewn about, so we didn't have much worry that we wouldn't be able to find what we needed.

We meet some savages:


In our walking, we had reached the lower end of the Pongo Canyon and could walk no further upstream along the banks. The caretaker at the casita had told us of a lookout point somewhere high up on the large mountain in front of us which formed one wall of the canyon, but lacking any sort of proper trail, we weren't sure just how we'd get up there. The problem was solved by taking a hard right away from the river and bashing our way through incredibly dense jungle foliage straight up the hillside. As we scrambled and climbed up the steep slope past giant trees hung with vines we simply had to slash through with machetes, scrabbling with our hands at the thick, dank, moist earth for purchase, I tried to avoid thinking about all the stingy, bitey, injecty-venomy type things that lived on all the trees, plants, and mulch we were shoving our way through. Finally we came to a granite cliff rising up through the jungle in front of us, and as none of our group had yet developed the ability to fly (although we're working on it, we're working on it. . .), we were temporarily stymied. So, we turned a hard left and worked our way up a small ledge formed by a large crack in the granite face, and finally emerged up onto the ridgeline. From there, we had a great view both back up into the Pongo Canyon, and also ahead down the river to what lay ahead. Too bad that no matter how high you climb, you can't see DANGER!

Up the hillside:


View back up the pongo canyon:


View ahead (not pictured: DANGER)


So, wiping off any remaining tarantulas, after a little while enjoying the view we descended back down to the river. We picked out a number of the craft from the banks and struggled them into the water. The locals stand on the rafts and use long poles to propel and steer the craft, so we went ahead and gave that a try as well. The initial result was a lot of spinning and tippy near-dunkings, but eventually we all managed to figure out how to move in generally the direction we wanted. It helped that the direction we wanted also happened to be the direction the river was going anyway, and you would be surprised how much effect the "current" has on which way one goes when standing on a big floating piece of wood in a river. You know what? I learned something that day.

So, after maybe a half hour of alternately whacking the water randomly with the long pole and windmilling my arms wildly while thrusting my pelvis first forward, then back in an attempt to stay upright on the damn things, we made it back to camp. Actually, we found the rafts to be quite sturdy and stable, and standing on them proved to be not much of a problem once you got the hang of it.




The next day we decided that before we strapped all of our gear on these things headed out for real, we'd do a short day-raft downriver to the town of Timpia to get the hang of maneouvering the rafts and to see whether we wanted to try to build a larger structure out of them or just use them as they were. The couple at the casita told us it was 2 hours to Timpia. We soon learned in our trip that everyone on the river were either insane optimists, or evil, lying bastards. 7 hours later we finally arrived in Timpia. The day was pleasant though, as we alternately stretched out and relaxed on the rafts as they floated downriver, and shot short sections of Class 3 rapids on the wooden vessels, not big enough to be too dangerous, but large enough to tense the old sphincter now and again. It was a fun day, but it left me sunburnt and hungry. It also left us in Timpia too late in the day to get back to the casita, so we headed into the community to see if we could scrounge up some food and a place to stay.

The communities along the river are small, and are most definitely the result of missionary activity. Timpia is one of the larger ones on this stretch of the river, with around 200 people living in small, tidy and well-kept wooden houses arranged along the sides of a long, grassy airstrip. The communities' each have a sort of tribal governing structure, with an elected "jefe" essentially running the show in their respective spheres of influence. In order to do anything in the town (including just being there), you have to search out the jefe and ask permission.

Timpia:


So, we set about trying to find said jefe, and get the required permission. This proved to be a somewhat difficult task, as everyone when questioned as to his whereabouts would wave vaguely in a direction further along and say "over there, I think". Finally we found him, and although at first he seemed a little standoffish to us, eventually he proved to be a very nice guy who supplied us with a room complete with beds in a visitors house the community had and a pot with dishes and a fire to cook over.

After eating, we retired early to our room in the small house the communitie let us use. Earlier, we had been wandering around the community and encountered the pastor of the community, an old white man (from Spain?) at the small church and spoke to him for awhile. We asked him if there was any problem with Malaria in the region, and if we should take any precautions to avoid mosquitos. He completely assuaged our fears, telling us that there hadn't been Malaria there in a long time, we had absolutely nothing to worry about. No, in fact we shouldn't be concerned with mosquitos at all. We should be worried about the vampire bats. Desculpe? It seems the area we were in has a small problem with vampire bats, which quite enjoy sucking the blood from your toes while you sleep. Now, as if a winged rat with fangs and beedy evil little red eyes turning your big toe into a Capri Sun while you sleep isn't enough of a problem, the little garlic-hating bastards also can carry rabies. Now as much of a fan of debilitating brain illnesses that leave one gibbering and foaming while their cerebrum runs out their nose and ears, I'd just as soon avoid getting rabies. So, we spent approximately the next 6 hours vampire-bat-proofing our room by stopping up all major entry points, hanging our mosquito nets with the sides held securely down to provide a secondary line of bat-stopping defense, and setting small bat traps like little tripwires and pits with spikes at the bottom loosely covered by wee reeds and baited with used bandaids. Luckily we made it through the night without loosing any blood.

The next day, we caught a public boat heading back upriver to the casa, a journey of only 2 hours. Now, how anyone can think that a trip in a long boat powered by a 60hp Honda outboard motor will take the same amount of time as that same trip done laying on a raft with only the current and intermittent farts for propulsion, is very much beyond me. After our experiment of the day before, we'd decided that the best option would be for each of us to simply float the river on our own, only lightly modified balsa raft, as they seemed perfectly serviceable without too much work on our part. So, we spent the rest of the afternoon procuring new rafts (those of the day before having been jettisoned in Timpia), looking for poles and oars (of which there were a few roughly made one's lying around on the beaches), and finding a dead person.

Yes, a dead person. Better yet, a headless dead person. To be more accurate, I found the dead person, then yelled to Tyler to come check out the skeleton I'd just found covered only in small patches with the dried remains of what had once been skin. To date, this brings the total aggregate number of dead people that I've found to roughly 1, so this was an interesting experience for me. We stood and looked at it for awhile, trying to figure out if there was something we should do (although the missing flesh and head told us it was probably a a little late for wilderness first aid). It was close by the banks of the river, so we figured it was probably someone who had drowned and washed ashore, and given the state had probably been there for some time. We finally decided to just tell the owners of the casita what we'd found and where, and let them go ahead and handle letting the appropriate people know. Great, so now while I'm trying to sleep I not only have to worry about vampires, but a walking corpse looking for its head. Sweet dreams.

Now that we had our rafts, we spent a couple of hours modifying them for long-term river travel. To mine, I added a small raised platform to strap my pack to in order to hold it out of the water, a seat at the back to sit on, some fuzzy dice and pink dashboard fur, and a horn that plays Mexican Hat Dance.

Let's do this:


And finally, the next morning we actually set off. The next four days we spent floating slowly down the river, running rapids and lounging on the rafts. The first day, Tyler flipped his raft in an eddy and got a fair portion of his gear wet, but as everything was strapped on tight with rope, no losses of property were sustained. Kat also had a minor wreck when she chose not to use the 50 foot wide stretches of river on either side of a large submerged tree in a slow moving part of the river that could be seen for quite some distance upstream, and instead ram directly into it and turn her raft over. This provided me with an chance to awesomely spring into action and rescue the damsel by diving off my raft and helping her turn hers right-side up. The major loss of the day was her digital camera, which despite what one would think, doesn't function when you can see water sloshing around behind the little display screen. They should really warn you about that in the manual.

The hard life:


Some jungle photos:




The days passed mostly the same, with around 3-5 hours rafting the river, then finding some pleasant beach somewhere to pull up the rafts and set up camp. In the evenings, we cooked over our campfire and watched the stars while we listened to the sounds of the jungle and drank rum. Some highlights:

A campsite:


Day 2: it's tea time. For some foolishly kickass reason, Bone's decided to light a fire on his raft (made out of wood) and prepare us all tea while we floated. It was a rousing success, and we enjoyed our hot tea under the boiling sun. The fire on his raft was kept carefully tended the rest of the day, and was only extinguished in a giant billow of smoke halfway through the next set of rapids.

Proof:




Day 3: fish soup. We'd purchased some line and hooks to try to fish, and Simon (using a small frog we caught as bait), caught a fish on his first try. I, being the only one who knew how (or so they all claimed), gutted and boned the sucker, and then made a quite pleasant stew out of it. My father is surely preening with pride over having been the one to teach me everything I know about fishing.



Day 4: the incident. The day passed much as the others had, floating the river and relaxing. At around 3 in the afternoon, we saw a good beach and pulled up the rafts to make camp. For a couple of days, we'd been discussing the idea of doing a night raft, floating down in the dark for a couple of hours, as soon as the river calmed down more. Over the last 4 days it had been gradually getting wider and slower, the rapids coming less frequently and with less intensity. Plus, the moon was close to full, so we'd have plenty of light, so we figured we'd spend the rest of the day just relaxing, and then set out again at sunset for our new adventure.

The night was gorgeous, warm and pleasant with a large moon shedding enough light to see generally what lay ahead. We strapped all the rafts together with rope into one large one, and Tyler and Simon rigged up our kerosene lantern on a pole off the front. The scene was idyllic, as we all lounged about on the raft in the soft glow from the latern, watching the dark jungle slide by and listening to the cacaphony of insects, toads, and nightbirds. Simon and Kate even pulled out their journals and tried to catch up on their writing. Everything was going great.




After only maybe 20 minutes of this, the river took a large bend around to the right, and we heard up ahead the rushing sound of turbulent water, indicating there was some thing other than slow, calm water ahead. We weren't worried, it was probably just a small eddy or something. As we got closer, the sound grew, so Simon casually suggested we might want to take up stations on the two outside rafts in case we had to paddle for any reason. "Should I put my journal away?" Kate asked in what was soon to be quite humorous irony.

Simon and Kate positioned themselves one behind the other on the far left raft, and I took up a position behind Bones on his raft on the left with my raft the next one in, my total lack of concern demonstrated by the fact that I sat facing backward on the bucket, it being the most comfortable perch that would allow me the casual paddling I was expecting. Tyler was standing on the front of our raft, holding the lantern out with one hand while shielding his eyes from the glare with the other like some sort of grizzled old mariner on lookout duty as the river suddenly picked up speed. The kilometer wide river suddenly began to narrow rapidly and the raft moved ever faster.

"I wonder how many rules of rafting we can break at once?" mused Simon aloud as we headed into the unknown disturbance ahead.

The first hint I had of trouble was someone saying something about big waves, which I thought was a joke. Someone cursed and Simon began yelling for us to paddle, so I craned my neck around to see what was coming, still not really believing we were actually in any danger. All I saw was white water, towering over the raft, a giant white wave that we were about to crash into. I paddled furiously as the front of the raft collided with the first of the huge 4-foot waves and the front rose over the top, sliding down the far side directly into a giant whirlpool larger than the raft. We spun around, the raft now facing backwards, as shouting and the sounds of snapping ropes and splintering wood filled the night. The ropes holding Bones' raft to the rest gave way and his craft began to seperate from mine. I leapt across the 3 foot gap onto my own raft, immediately dropping down to my knees and holding on tightly, only to turn to find the raft I'd just left being thrown by the water back on top of my own. It slammed onto mine, canting crazily at a 45 degree angle with Bones hanging off the side in the roaring rapids just as the final bonds holding the whole structure together gave way with a shuddering groan. "She's breaking up!" I shouted over the roar and yelling as Bones and I were swept off down the river away from the others, still loosely connected and with his raft half on mine, him in the water clinging desperately. The last I saw of the others was Simon and Kate on the far raft, as Simon shouted "Hold on Kate" while she screamed before we were rushed away into the night. I had no time to think about them as Bones and I had problems of our own, the river still throwing us around and him still in the water. I lunged over the top of his raft and grabbed his arm, helping him onto his raft before diving back across both to snatch his MSR stove kit as it floated by. In a matter of seconds, we were washed out the bottom of the rapids, and found ourselves in fast-moving but relatively calm water, so we immediately started paddling hard for the far shore. Pulling our rafts up onto the rocky beach, we pulled out our headlamps and immediately began running back up the shore to find out what had happened to the others, as they hadn't yet come down the river. A short distance along the bank we found Tyler, beaching his craft and unhurt. The three of us ran further on, looking for any sign of Simon and Kate who still hadn't passed by. We came to the bank directly across from the rapids and shouted, but there was no answer. We had no idea where they were, if they were safe, anything. After a few frantic moments, we saw a headlight on the far shore, and tried to signal. We thought we heard a shout, but couldn't hear anything over the raging river. We knew Simon didn't have a headlamp, so it must be Kate on the far shore, but was Simon with her? The place on the bank where she was was halfway through the rapids, so if they were both there, would they shoot the rest and come further down? Did they have even have rafts or gear still? We had no way to know, so we did the best we could: we walked back down to where Bones and I had beached our craft and built a giant fire and set up camp to wait. We cooked some food and took stock of the situation: we had no idea about the others, but out of our portion of the gear we had only lost a cup, a large bunch of bananas, and a half-full bottle of rum. After that little bit of excitement, the rum was sorely missed. Finally, after a couple of hours waiting with no word from them, we went to bed. There was nothing else we could do.

The next morning we were up early, with first light. We walked back up the river to the rapids to see if we could see the others. On the far side of the river next to the bank, the rapids formed a large backwater eddy (which for those who aren't familiar with river dynamics, is when the fast moving water on the sides of the rapids actually turns and heads back upstream and are very difficult to extricate yourself from if you get stuck in them; often you find yourself finally managing to get your raft back into the main flow only to be sucked back into the eddy again and sent back upstream to try again). On the bank next to the eddy, there was one raft beached with the gear still on it. Kat and Simon were nowhere to be seen at first, but finally after a wait, we saw them both moving around further up the bank. They both looked safe and sound, which was a relief, but we couldn't communicate with them over the river. We eventually solved this when Simon worked his way much further down the bank where there were no rapids and we could communicate by shouting.

While the rest of us were washed out of the rapids the night before, Kat and Simon had encountered other problems. The two of them, still attached together, had been sucked into the eddy and been unable to extricate themselves. After 4 or 5 attempts, going around and around in the eddy trying to get back out into the rapids, they finally had to beach the rafts and give up. They couldn't beach both rafts, so they had to cut one away and let it go. It was sucked away and lost to us, somehow finding its own way out of the eddy where they had failed. In the dark, they'd scrambled up the bank (no beach for them, only a small red clay shore and jungle beyond) and walked through the jungle trying to work their way upstream to a beach to sleep. Luckily, they'd stumbled on an abandoned casa in the jungle, and slept warm and fairly dry inside. (Simon later told us that the whirlpool was so strong it sucked his sandal and sock right off his foot)

The problem now was how to reunite our little group. The raft they had was useless, as they couldn't get it out of the rapids to come over to our side. After only an hours wait, a local man coming downstream in a dugout canoe with a long-shafted motor called a peke-peke stopped and ferried them across.

--

Kat had originally planned to leave the trip early so she could make it back to Cusco in time for a trek, and as we now only had 3 rafts remaining, now seemed a slightly early but opportune moment. Tyler and I had also been planning to split up for a couple months so we could each pursue our seperate agendas before we meet back up in Rio in the next week to continue the trip north(more on that later), and I had decided to leave the trip a bit earlier than the other 3 as well to make the timelines sync, so leaving with Kat was the best idea all-around. As her and I peke-peke'd away from the bank, we waved goodbye to Tyler, Bones, and Simon. The next parts of each of our stories are fantastic adventures in themselves, but the stories can be recounted later, as this post is quite long enough.

And just to leave you with a better idea of our crew:

- posted by Micah @ 1:42 PM