Running the Amazon

by Joe Kane

  The men grunted, a few said hello. The women hurried silently behind them. They had a long hike home, and they would be back on the trail before dawn.

  We camped in a cow pasture next to a stream. I heard a loud report and looked up the slope to see a man holding a rifle, which when he again slapped it against a tree I saw was actually a foot plow. I turned back to the camp. Six Quechua men stood in a row a few feet in front of me, passing a bottle of cañazo. More than one found the ground beneath his feet a little shifty.

  A man stepped forward and pointed to another, who appeared to be the oldest of them, though with the Quechua it was hard for me to judge age.

  “This is the lieutenant of Huayque,” the younger man said. “It would please him to see your license.”

  “License?”

  “Your permission.”

  “Permission?”

  Fortunately, Bzdak knew this ritual, its steps as prescribed as those of a formal dance. He explained that we were visiting Huayque as representatives of the Peruvian government, that we were exploring sites for a great film project, that we hoped to tell the world of the glory of Peru. And so on. Meanwhile I rummaged through my pack and found a photocopy of a letter from the Peruvian tourist board. The teniente studied it carefully, impeded not at all, apparently, by the fact that he was reading it upside down.

  “We will be here only one night,” Bzdak said.

  The man grunted and returned the paper.

  “Please be our guests,” he said. “We did not mean to offend you. We were afraid that you would steal our cattle.”

  He wished us well, bowed deeply, and led the men back to the trail in single file. A few stumbled slightly as they went, but overall, I thought, they carried themselves with an earthy dignity.

  From Huayque we dropped down, way down, breaking toenails against the insides of our boots. Late the next afternoon we arrived on the canyon floor at the point where the mud-red Chacco River empties into the turquoise-green Apurimac. At the town of Acos, a mile from the confluence, we picked up a dirt road used for bus traffic to Cuzco. But we followed it the other way, into Pillpinto, where we were to meet the kayakers.

  Where it flowed through Pillpinto the Apurimac was wide and shallow, lacking the power and urgency it had displayed farther up the canyon, and the town itself had a surliness similar to that of Yauri, the Hanging Bridge, and Surimana. The staring crowd that wouldn’t leave us in peace went with the territory, but these people had none of the brightness we had seen in, say, San Juan, or even Huayque. It was impossible to carry on a conversation. We sat in the dirt, surrounded, until long after dark, went to sleep with the townsfolk staring into our tents, and in the morning pulled back tent flaps to find them still there.

  In the end, lacking a better explanation, I decided that it was the road that triggered this impotent hostility. It promised so much—trade, culture, escape—but judging by the beaten-down look of the town and its people, it delivered very little.

  The kayakers had arrived in Pillpinto the same afternoon. All looked battered except Truran. Odendaal’s face was bloody and swollen, Chmielinski’s nose reinjured. Biggs’s appearance was drawn, his ebullience forced. There was evident tension between Chmielinski and Odendaal (at one point I heard the Pole mutter, “On the river he is a baby”), and Chmielinski, if not directing the expedition, certainly was not following Odendaal’s lead. Given my fragile perch on the journey, this did not augur well for me. I was sure that Chmielinski saw me as Odendaal’s soldier, and I suspected the only reason I (or, for that matter, Durrant or Leon) remained on the expedition was that Bzdak had put in a good word.

  “El Condorito.” (illustration Credit 6.1)

  At 15,000 feet on the approach to the source. From left, François Odendaal, Tim Biggs, Pastor. (illustration Credit 6.2)

  Base camp at the source of the Amazon (17,000 feet). (illustration Credit 6.3)

  Zbyszek Bzdak at the source of the Amazon. (illustration Credit 6.4)

  Dr. Kate Durrant and the author in San Juan. (illustration Credit 6.5)

  Portaging the upper Apurimac. From bottom to top: Piotr Chmielinski, Tim Biggs, François Odendaal, Jerome Truran. (illustration Credit 6.6)

  The last Inca hanging bridge, woven entirely of hammered grass. (illustration Credit 6.7)

  Kate Durrant consulting patients near the Hanging Bridge, and Jerome Truran on the upper Apurimac. (illustration Credit 6.8)

  Piotr Chmielinski, Jerome Truran, Tim Biggs. (illustration Credit 6.9)

  Tim Biggs on the upper Apurimac. (illustration Credit 6.10)

  Quechua man and son. (illustration Credit 6.11)

  Shakedown run on the Apurimac: Piotr Chmielinski, the author, Sergio Leon, Kate Durrant. (illustration Credit 6.12)

  Jerome Truran in the Acobamba Abyss. (illustration Credit 6.13)

  Lining the raft through the Acobamba Abyss. (illustration Credit 6.14)

  In the Acobamba Abyss (note high-water mark). (illustration Credit 6.15)

  Jerome Truran in the Acobamba Abyss. (illustration Credit 6.16)

  Tim Biggs executing an Eskimo roll. (illustration Credit 6.17)

  Cloud Forest in the Red Zone. From foreground: Jerome Truran, Tim Biggs, François Odendaal. (illustration Credit 6.18)

  Piotr Chmielinski (left), Jerome Truran, Peruvian marine in the Red Zone. (illustration Credit 6.19)

  In the Red Zone. Left to right, on raft: Jerome Truran, the author, Kate Durrant. (illustration Credit 6.20)

  Asháninka man. (illustration Credit 6.21)

  On the lower Tambo. From left: Kate Durrant and Jerome Truran on native raft; Piotr Chmielinski and the author on gringo equivalent. (illustration Credit 6.22)

  Piotr Chmielinski (left), Kate Durrant, and the author with sea kayaks and the Jhuliana in Pucallpa. (illustration Credit 6.23)

  I decided I had better establish some kind of communication with Chmielinski. Try as I might, however, I could not find a way to do this. In conversation he was polite but formal. He was also one of the most intense men I had ever met. On the nights we had camped with the kayakers, I had watched him labor by candlelight until long after dark, his ledgers and maps and notebooks (which he carried in a waterproof plastic box tucked deep in the nose of his kayak) spread out on some cleverly built driftwood desk or on the floor of his tent.

  From what Truran said, this intensity carried over to the river. It was Chmielinski who harangued the South Africans to wake before dawn, Chmielinski who pushed them onto the river and kept them on it until late in the day. Truran said that Chmielinski attacked the river like a military man. He was brave, and though his kayaking skills were self-taught, he had a superb feel for white water—he refused to let the river’s power intimidate him. He felt the river in his bones and respected it the way a general does a worthy enemy: It was something to conquer.

  Each day Chmielinski prepared himself as if for combat. He was the first man awake, the first man packed, the first man with his boat in the water. His daily uniform—long polypropylene underwear and crisp paddling shorts—was so unvarying, and so fresh compared with the rags the others were now wearing, that Truran half suspected the Pole kept spares hidden in his boat.

  The final steps in Chmielinski’s matutinal ritual were the most telling: Using a pocket mirror, he carefully combed his hair and applied a combination of lotions and sunscreens that looked, to Truran, exactly like war paint. Then Chmielinski hauled his boat down to the Apurimac and paddled off to do battle.

  The morning after we arrived at Pillpinto Chmielinski and Odendaal outlined what would be the next, and thus far the longest, leg of the campaign. Once again we would divide into groups, and reunite ten days later, at the military bridge near the town of Chinchaypujio. The expedition would meet Van Heerden and Condorito in Cuzco, which was connected to Chinchaypujio by a dirt road, take a short break, then return to the Apurimac and continue the journey by kayak and white-water raft only. From there down, the canyon would be too steep to hike.
Bzdak and I would remain in Cuzco, buy supplies for the next two months of the trip, and drive Condorito back to the Apurimac to rejoin the expedition at a second bridge, Cunyac, some twenty-five miles below the military bridge. Condorito’s owner would meet us in Cuzco, ride with us to Cunyac, then take the vehicle home to Arequipa. The road to Cunyac would be the last to reach the river until we were well into the jungle.

  The plan disappointed me for reasons that were completely selfish. Although our long trek had been unanticipated, I had become attached to the idea of traveling along the entire river. In the jungle, that might mean banana boats. But the white-water raft would be the only way to see the lower Apurimac canyon. It was therefore conceivable that of the Amazon’s four thousand two hundred miles, I would miss only those twenty-five between the military bridge and the resupply point at Cunyac. I found the distance both insignificant and monumental.

  The plan was fair, however. No one had promised I would be on the entire river in the first place. At least I would remain a member of the expedition. Nor was it hard to reconcile myself to a week of fresh food, cold beer, and hot showers in Cuzco.

  But first our ragged “B” team had to reach Chinchaypujio.

  We marched out of Pillpinto with packs stocked for seven days, but we did not expect a difficult hike. According to our map, the trail ran right next to the river, and would be fast and level. Domestic tobacco growing just outside Pillpinto signaled fertile country. We would be able to flesh out our rations, stretch them to a ten-day kit, as we went.

  We hadn’t counted on the new road from Pillpinto to the provincial capital of Paruro. It went through the next valley beyond the southwest wall of the Apurimac canyon, and the Apurimac trail had been abandoned in favor of the road. A few miles below Pillpinto the trail vanished.

  We laughed that first day when the lone Quechua man we met in the canyon insisted we hire him as a guide. By the end of the second day, after climbing twenty-five hundred vertical feet up the canyon wall, some of it hand-over-hand technical climbing, we weren’t laughing. Each of us but Durrant had taken nasty falls (after her two weeks on the trail, the doctor had blossomed into a strong, nimble hiker), and we stumbled into the village of Colcha sporting open wounds. But Colcha proved friendly in the Quechua way—implacable, calm, unimpressed—and a helpful family herded us into their courtyard and assisted as Durrant cleaned us up. They plied us with chicha, boiled corn, eggs, and cabbage, and said we were idiots for following the river. If we thought that last stretch was bad, wait until we saw the next.

  With that warning we chose to cleave to the canyon’s upper rim. The canyon floor, meanwhile, plunged deeper and deeper in the earth. A few days later, we hiked along the rim a half mile from the river horizontally but some six thousand two hundred feet above it. (By comparison, the Grand Canyon of the Colorado reaches a maximum depth of five thousand three hundred feet, but at its narrowest point is four miles wide.)

  We found this new country both wilder and tamer than any we had already seen. The towns reached by road—Paruro, Paccaritambo, Huanoquite—seemed, after the time we had spent in the primitive upper canyon, almost modern. Paruro had a streetlight, and Bzdak bought a banana, our first fresh fruit in a month. In Paccaritambo no one knew the location of the sacred caves from which had sprung the mythical founders of the Inca empire. In Aravito we met a colony of Quechua Jews. It was Saturday morning and we heard wailing more than a mile away. Señor Apasas, a gentle, prosperous-looking Quechua man (full set of teeth, leather shoes), explained that a rabbi had lived there for eight years, and that many of the village’s people had adopted Judaism. Bzdak said he found such a wholesale conversion mind-boggling. Señor Apasas replied, without a hint of cynicism, “We will do anything for entertainment.”

  In the gaping spaces between these villages, however, the country was as wild as anything in the Peruvian Andes. Hawks and eagles calmly stood their ground as we hiked by them in the high passes. Often the trails marked on our map no longer existed. The few people who lived there, according to the village dwellers, were bravos, which literally means “bold ones” but in idiomatic use connotes something more. The bravos, we were to believe, were bogeymen. They were crazy, they had guns, they would eat us.

  Quite the opposite was true, of course. The outlanders were for the most part humble, quiet Quechua folk who apparently wanted nothing more than simply to be left alone. Few spoke Spanish, but because we were so often lost (there were no roads or signposts, and the trails were obscure), they felt bound to guide us. Unable to communicate, they would increase the velocity of their replies, hoping to overcome mutual incomprehension with sheer exuberance. More than once we left an exasperated Quechua standing alone on a mountainside, pointing in all directions and chattering away in frustration.

  But it is this scene that sticks: Two squat Quechua women watch us descend a barren hillside. For at least an hour they stare without moving as we approach the tiny, dry basin that holds their two mud huts. Trembling, they study us until they can see our eyes, then turn their backs and stand stiff and silent as stone. We pass within a few yards and begin to climb the opposite hillside. Only then does one of them yell, “Hola, viracochas”—“Viracocha” being an Inca creator god associated with the sea and with white, and emissaries of whom the brutal conquistadores were at first thought to be.

  Though the word is now used commonly, the equivalent of “gentleman,” I shuddered involuntarily.

  The river swelled and picked up speed. The three lead kayakers handled it well, but Odendaal all but stopped running it. Even above small rapids he hesitated and, often as not, elected to portage. At times he was able to hire local people and pack animals to help him carry his gear, which enabled him to move quickly, but the day before the team reached the military bridge, Biggs decided the situation had to change. Below the bridge the canyon would grow much steeper and narrower, and the river would increase greatly in volume and force. Portaging would be much more difficult, if not impossible.

  While Chmielinski and Truran pushed ahead, Biggs hung back with Odendaal and coached him in the Eskimo roll, a technique for righting an upturned kayak while still in it, and as critical to navigating high-grade white water as catching a fly ball is to a professional baseball player. Biggs made Odendaal roll and roll and roll. He also worked on Odendaal’s ferry glide and reverse ferry glide, techniques essential for traversing rapids safely.

  Biggs had faith in his friend, and if nothing else, the attention he paid boosted Odendaal’s confidence. On the morning of the day they were to reach the military bridge, Odendaal looked sharper and stronger than he had at any other time during the trip. Biggs’s work appeared to have paid off.

  A few miles above the bridge they stopped to practice ferry gliding one more time. Odendaal missed his eddy, flipped his boat, failed to execute a roll, and was sucked into the heart of a rapid. When he came up, his face was covered with blood.

  “Help me!” he yelled. “I’m bad!”

  He managed to crawl up on the bank. When Biggs reached him he was holding his head in his hands and had a vicious bloody gash across his chin. Biggs shaved Odendaal’s stubbly blond beard away from the wound, then cleaned and bandaged the wound for the truck ride to Cuzco.

  Biggs felt bad about his friend’s pain, and worried that the accident would wipe out Odendaal’s confidence. After resting in Cuzco they would enter the least-known, most inaccessible part of the river. What would happen to Odendaal down there?

  Cuzco is said to be the oldest inhabited city in the Western Hemisphere. Set in a fertile green valley, it is interesting in a dollhouse kind of way, with its cobbled streets, jigsaw-puzzle stone walls, and the splendid mountains rising around it. Its history is palpable: You can shudder in the plaza where the Spanish butchered the Tupac Amarus, you can attend Mass in the same churches in which the Spanish communed with their god. But Cuzco is still a city, and more like any other city in the world than it is the countryside beyond its borders. You c
an easily find cold beer, American bourbon, hotels with hot showers and sheeted beds, photocopiers, telephones, Michael Jackson records, Time, Newsweek, the International Herald Tribune. At the end of an October day you will know more about the World Series than you will about the Andean potato crop.

  For us, I am afraid, Cuzco was simply a place to eat and sleep and worry about the lower Apurimac. Chmielinski consulted Edwin Goycochea, a river-running friend whose rafting company, Rio Bravo, was based in Cuzco. Goycochea had rafted the twenty-five-mile stretch below the military bridge three times, but had quit running the river after a confrontation with Sendero Luminoso guerrillas. He had not been on the Apurimac in two years. Since then, the guerrilla conflict had intensified and most of the lower river had been put under martial law and closed to outsiders. No one in Cuzco knew what to expect between the second bridge, Cunyac, and a settlement called Luisiana, two hundred miles below it. Apparently a neighboring settlement, Villa Virgen, had been bombed off the map, first by guerrillas, then by the military.

  There were also the sketchy records of several previous explorations. In 1953 a Frenchman, Michel Perrin, and his Limeña girlfriend, Teresa Gutierrez, put two folding kayaks on the river at the Cunyac bridge. They had hoped to open a new route into the jungle and thereby promote colonization of the lower Apurimac, but terrible rapids forced them to quit the river two days later. They left the canyon, traveled overland, and reentered the river eighty miles downstream. They capsized in minutes. Gutierrez drowned. Perrin, heartbroken, left the Apurimac and never returned.