Running the Amazon

by Joe Kane

  I was skeptical. Man had golfed on the moon but had yet to travel his planet’s most famous river from source to sea? Still, I listened.

  Odendaal’s expedition would begin with a climb to the source of the Amazon, a snowfield high in the Andes. There his team would mount white-water kayaks, which they would paddle some four hundred miles down the Apurimac, one of the most dangerous white-water rivers on Earth. Once on the jungle floor, they would switch to sea kayaks for the three-thousand-eight-hundred-mile haul through the Amazon basin to the Atlantic Ocean. Odendaal estimated his journey would take four months.

  He had a problem, however. At the last minute, the British film company that was to have sponsored him had withdrawn its backing. The expedition, scheduled to depart for South America in six weeks, was about to collapse. He said mutual acquaintances had suggested I might write press releases to help him raise money.

  I said I didn’t do that kind of work; he should try a public relations firm instead. I gave him a name and wished him luck. We hung up.

  I finished the newspaper column in mid-afternoon, bought a six-pack of beer, and walked to the beach. I swam in the cold Pacific. Then I lay down in the sand, opened a beer, and settled into that glazed state that precedes an afternoon nap. Tropical images bubbled up from my subconscious: parrots, palm trees, monkeys swinging on vines.

  I bolted awake, anxious, and found myself ticking off the reasons a man like me could not go to the Amazon. I had just begun living with a woman who had recently graduated from law school. We might soon marry. Though my job was nothing spectacular, I was competent at it, and it was secure.

  The relationship scared me and I was bored with the job. That was the source of my anxiety. When I got home, I called the night line at Odendaal’s university. “Don’t look at the dog!”

  I looked at the dog, looked right into the beast’s beady eyes. It sprang at my face but got instead the car window between its fangs and my neck—and a swift fist from François Odendaal.

  “My apologies,” he said. “I should have warned you sooner.” He leaned into the car and cooed to the whimpering animal. “The dog is a dingo. I found him when I was studying in Australia. He wandered in from the outback, starving and nearly dead, and I saved him. He has been with me ever since. He hates people. He would tear your eyes out.”

  The small dog frightened me. It was shorthaired, wiry, and ugly, and even after the punch it glowered at me, muttering from low in its throat. When I looked at it again it exploded in wild barking and threw itself at the window a second time. I didn’t look at it after that.

  I looked at Odendaal. We were about the same age (he had said he was thirty), but he was not what I had expected. He was tall and had thinning red hair and the beginning of a pot belly and a funny kind of bouncing limp when he walked, as if he had sprained an ankle. He did not look like an athlete.

  He said, “You do not look like the man I expected,” and I thought: Well.

  I stared at his feet, rudely. I couldn’t help it. They were oddly small for his height. “Polio,” he said, without reproach, as if my reaction were one he often experienced. Offering no further explanation, he asked, “May I buy you a beer?”

  We were in a resort town high in the Colorado Rockies, near where Odendaal was spending a part of the summer supervising a butterfly research station. We found a bar and sat down at a table. Odendaal spread out a map rendered in garish colors, as if it had been lifted from the bulletin board of an elementary-school classroom. Here, on what turned out to be a map prepared by the Peruvian military, were the mountains, in lurid orange; the cloud forest, in bubbly pink and screaming gold; the jungle, in—of course—funky, primordial green.

  I watched Odendaal trace the blue vein that would define his journey. It was an intoxicating exercise; maps are such seductive fictions. The river names bewitched me. Apacheta, Lloqueta, Hornillos, Apurimac, Ene, Tambo, Ucayali, Marañón, Solimões, Amazon. Pronounced, they twisted the tongue in sensual ways. They sang, they enticed.

  So did the campaign Odendaal laid out. He would climb big mountains, kayak wild rivers, at least one of which had never been run, and travel areas that were virtually unmapped. In one of those unmapped places, called the Red Zone, the Peruvian government was engaged in an exceptionally grisly war with the Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path. “These are guerrillas,” Odendaal said. “You may have heard of them. Every once in a while they kill people, including journalists.” He looked at me and laughed. The Red Zone was under martial law and closed to outsiders. Odendaal would have to sneak through it. Later, he would spend weeks in the heart of Peru’s cocaine-producing country. He would meet exotic tribes. Britain’s prestigious Royal Geographical Society had already invited him to speak upon completion of his journey.

  Odendaal lit a cigarette and sat back. “What do you think?” he asked.

  The deal was this: If I could raise money from a publisher and contribute it to the expedition, Odendaal would let me write about his adventure. I would shadow the team as best I could. For the first month I would ride in a support truck, but after that, when we ran out of road, it would be raft, banana boat, whatever.

  I wasn’t particularly qualified for the trip. I spoke Spanish, and I was in decent physical shape—I ran five miles a day and did two hundred push-ups—but I had never been on a white-water raft, and I was not a good swimmer. By no means was I an “explorer.” Still, I felt that the life I lived was a step removed: filtered, rehearsed, relayed.

  Six weeks after that first phone call, I quit my job and kissed my girlfriend good-bye. Feverish and sweating from a battery of injections received the night before, I met François Odendaal at the San Francisco airport, where we boarded a plane for Lima, Peru.

  Over Mexico we spoke about the expedition. Odendaal was worried about the river, about his health, about money. But the thing that worried him most, the thing that had his guts in an uproar, was Piotr Chmielinski.

  Chmielinski was the expedition’s co-organizer. Odendaal had met him only once, but he said that he had found the Pole brilliant, tireless, and ambitious. Chmielinski’s first descent of the Colca had made him a celebrity in Peru, and he had an easy way with the Byzantine workings of the Peruvian bureaucracy. He knew how to get equipment into the country without its being confiscated, was adept at wheedling favors from government officials, understood the peasants who lived along the rivers.

  But Odendaal feared that Chmielinski would try to seize control of the expedition at the first opportunity. In fact, he said, Chmielinski had already attempted one such coup. When Odendaal’s film backing had collapsed, Chmielinski had found new money, from a Wyoming millionaire who’d cornered the U.S. market for highway-stripe paint. Odendaal said that Chmielinski had then tried to force him to surrender his role as leader, but Odendaal had contacted the sponsor himself and won his support. (“Do you know how a millionaire’s asshole smells? Wonderful, just wonderful.”) Odendaal said he would have thrown the Pole off the expedition had he not sorely needed his expertise. But he was worried. Peru was Chmielinski’s turf.

  The plane bounced twice: Lima.

  2 • The Colca

  Lima, Melville wrote in Moby Dick, is “the strangest saddest city thou canst see … there is a higher horror in the whiteness of her woe.” There was woe aplenty in the city the night we arrived, but we couldn’t see it, for its color was not white but black. Guerrillas had bombed the city’s main power plants, plunging her into a darkness punctuated only by an occasional oil-drum fire.

  Sergio Leon, with whom Odendaal had worked in Costa Rica, arrived on the flight after ours. We spent three days together in Lima, but I never got a good look at the city. My perspective was jaundiced. I fell sick the second day, erupting in a fit of spasms brought on, I suspected, by nerves, travel fatigue, and the medicine I was taking to prevent altitude sickness, one of whose side effects, apparently, was altitude sickness.

  That third morning I awoke drained and beaten, my clothes soaked
with sweat, my head hot with fever. Nevertheless, while Odendaal remained in Lima to await other expedition members, Leon and I set off on an eighteen-hour bus ride down Peru’s desolate Pacific coast. We were bound for Arequipa, from where we would commence our climb to the source of the Amazon, and where we hoped to meet the notorious Chmielinski and his partner, Zbigniew Bzdak.

  At some time during the night we veered east and began climbing into the Andes. At dawn we pulled into Arequipa, Peru’s forgotten metropolis, a high, sunny, desert city set against a spectacular trio of snow-covered volcanoes. Arequipa is home to six hundred thousand short, calm people, no flies, and no joggers. The city takes its name from a Quechua expression that means “You are welcome to stay.”

  We went to our lodgings. That night I received a phone call.

  “Hola,” I said when I picked up the phone.

  “Hello,” the voice came back in English. “How going is everything?”

  Piotr Chmielinski proved to be a crisp, auburn-haired man of medium height, lean but muscular, with a dapper mustache and the cool blue eyes of a wolf. Polite but reserved, he did not smile as we ate ice cream in Arequipa’s Plaza de Armas and watched a shuffling parade of Quechua Indians play “Jesus Christ Superstar” on quena flutes, their round tones soothing after the jarring bus ride.

  I was surprised when Chmielinski said he had rented a house to serve as expedition headquarters. It seemed extravagant. Odendaal, I said, had told us he would be in Arequipa in a few days and that we would leave the day after he arrived.

  “Two weeks,” Chmielinski said. “At the least.” His tone implied that the discussion was closed.

  When Leon and I reported for duty the next morning Chmielinski assigned us to help Bzdak provision the expedition.

  “Call me Zbyszek,” the photographer said, offering a Polish diminutive that rhymed roughly with fish shack. “It is easier.” He was wrong about that, but he didn’t seem to mind my fumbling his name. He was Chmielinski’s opposite, loose and easygoing, and he quickly formulated what would be our only guideline in securing food: “No mess.” If it couldn’t be boiled, dissolved, or eaten cold, we didn’t want it.

  We had a few supplies on hand already. Chmielinski had persuaded a Canadian company, Yurika, to provide us with a stock of their product, which was designed for the survivalist market. It was whole food vacuum-packed into aluminum envelopes. You dropped an envelope in boiling water for five minutes, then dumped the stuff over instant rice or potatoes. Our diet in some of the planet’s most desolate locales would include beef burgundy, chicken cacciatore, and, for those nights of complete abandon, sweet-and-sour shrimp.

  But that alone wouldn’t be enough. We spent the next week scrambling about Arequipa’s labyrinthine marketplace. One old woman sold us cinnamon and oatmeal, another canned sardines, a third tins of black-market chocolate. We found local cheese in waxed two-kilo wheels, which would keep well. We bought all we could afford, as well as bagged tea, instant coffee, powdered milk, sacks of sugar.

  Once, urchins jumped me and tried to steal the bundles of paper money (soles) strapped to my body in bulging lumps. Bzdak slapped them away and, unbowed under twenty kilos of chocolate, continued his charge down Arequipa’s narrow cobbled streets, stopping to chat every block or so in Spanish, English, or Polish with some old friend or recent acquaintance. Leon and I staggered along behind, gasping in the thin mountain air and wondering if the expedition would ever begin.

  Tim Biggs arrived in Arequipa next, accompanied by a tall, blond, twenty-nine-year-old South African named Jerome Truran. Biggs, appointed river captain by Odendaal, would have final say over how each section of the river would be run. Truran would assist him, sharing the lead through the most difficult rapids. The two men had been teammates on the South African kayaking circuit for almost a decade, a relationship that had ended in the face of international sanctions against South African athletes. Biggs had retired, but Truran had emigrated to England, where he eventually gained citizenship (his great-grandfather had been British). Truran had quickly won a berth on the British national team and established himself as one of the world’s premier kayakers, winning a gold medal at the 1980 European Wild Water Championship, a silver medal at the 1981 World WWC, and a gold medal at the 1982 National WWC.

  Biggs had turned to exploring. During three river trips with Odendaal (to Africa’s Limpopo River, Alaska’s Colville, and the Urubamba) he had developed a deep affection for the Afrikaner. Biggs had seen the hell of polio firsthand—his older brother had been crippled by it—and he respected the effort Odendaal had made to rise above his handicap. For Biggs, Odendaal had the soul of a poet. He was a visionary, a mystic.

  But Biggs worried about him. Odendaal’s handicap stoked a great ambition, but he was not much of a kayaker, and his expeditions were not always smoothly run. And so Biggs had urged Odendaal to invite Chmielinski and Truran. Biggs admired the Pole’s organizational skills and his knowledge of Peru, and Truran he trusted with his life. Biggs knew he would spend most of his time on the river protecting Odendaal; he wanted someone looking out for Tim Biggs.

  Kate Durrant rode the bus into Arequipa alone, a day behind Biggs and Truran, and immediately set to work assembling individual medical kits for each of us to carry, going over our medical records, bringing us up to date on injections, and double-checking the hundreds of items in the big aluminum medical crate that would accompany us down the Amazon.

  Meanwhile, Chmielinski managed to borrow a Land Rover—no small feat in Peru—and he, Truran, and Biggs took on the imposing task of retrofitting it. El Condorito (“The Little Condor”) would be our mother ship for the first four to six weeks of our journey, rendezvousing with the kayakers (Odendaal, Biggs, Truran, and Chmielinski) every week or so and hauling the support-team members, food, the medical crate, spare kayaks and paddles, camping gear, and film.

  Or so we had hoped, until we made a test loading. When Chmielinski drove poor Condorito down one of Arequipa’s pitted streets the truck rocked violently and listed hard to port. We would have to reduce our load. More important, we saw for a fact what most of us had suspected: Condorito could not possibly carry the entire support crew.

  That night I studied the topographic maps I had bought in Lima. The headwaters and the upper Apurimac flowed through high, desolate plateaus and steep, sparsely inhabited canyons, but there did appear to be trails. I told Chmielinski that if I were able to handle the climb to the source, I would then be willing to try to walk the first leg of the trip.

  I couldn’t determine exactly how long that walk would be. It would cover about a hundred and fifty river miles, but given all the climbing and descending of canyon walls, it might be three hundred miles by foot. (A British man, John Ridgway, had hiked the lower country in 1970. It would take weeks just to get down to the point at which he had begun his walk.)

  Despite the trek’s length, my plan was selfish and pragmatic. I was bound to be the first man booted off the overcrowded truck, in which case I would have to fly ahead to the city of Cuzco and hole up there for a month or more while I waited for the rest of the expedition to work its way down out of the high mountains.

  I was relieved when Chmielinski endorsed my proposal.

  When the British filmmakers pulled out of the Amazon project (Odendaal said they had demanded more control of the project than he was willing to relinquish), Odendaal decided to make his own documentary. He recruited a two-man camera crew from South Africa. Two weeks after Leon and I arrived in Arequipa, Odendaal flew in from Lima with Fanie Van der Merwe, who taught at a film school in Pretoria, and Pierre Van Heerden, one of Van der Merwe’s former students. Both had experience as cameramen for mountaineering expeditions, and both were tall, dark, hard-drinking, chain-smoking Afrikaners.

  A few nights later we gathered by candlelight around the broad wooden table in the kitchen of our Arequipa headquarters. Odendaal sat at one end of the table, Chmielinski at the other, while the rest of us sat between, pas
sing a bottle of the Peruvian grape brandy called pisco. Odendaal delivered a long speech, emphasizing that he had included Chmielinski as co-organizer of the expedition out of respect for his skill and his knowledge of Peru, but that he, Odendaal, was the leader, alone and uncontested, and anyone unwilling to accept that was invited to leave.

  When he had finished, he looked to each of us, and then to the end of the table. He asked Chmielinski for comment.

  “What is the problem?” the Pole asked in a low voice. “You are the leader. We all know that.”

  Through a Peruvian friend, Mauricio De Romaña, the resourceful Chmielinski borrowed a second truck, an old but sturdy GMC flatbed. This and Condorito would haul the entire team up to the Colca valley, some fifty miles inland from, and five thousand feet above, Arequipa. From the Colca, Odendaal, Chmielinski, Bzdak, Biggs, Van der Merwe, Van Heerden, and I would attempt to climb by foot to the source of the Amazon, a snowfield atop 18,000-foot Mount Mismi. Durrant, Truran, and Leon would drive Condorito around the mountain and meet us fifteen miles beyond the source, on the Atlantic side of the continental divide. From there, on foot, we would trace the runoff from the divide until it grew deep enough to support the four-man kayak team.

  This, at any rate, was the plan, and the next morning, beneath a blood-colored dawn, we loaded the trucks and set course for the high Andes. We made our jarring ascent via a dirt track that contoured the flank of Mount Chachani, one of the trio of volcanoes hovering over Arequipa like brooding monks. Arequipa was quickly swallowed by the dust-swept puna, and within a matter of hours, as we climbed to fifteen thousand feet (higher than any point in the continental United States), my every effort became concentrated on choking back the nausea of soroche, or altitude sickness.