(Note: upon attempting to download all the photos I had taken during this awesome adventure, the files were somehow corrupted and all but a handful of pictures lost. You can imagine how happy I was. So, if this post is a bit lacking in photos, well, now you know why.)So, while Micah was busy recuperating in Cusco and attempting to find his way to Macchu Pichu, I headed north with Simon to the mountaineering capital of South America: Huaraz, Perú. My reasoning for heading there was quite simple: I wanted to do some more trekking and I had heard that there were some truly awe inspiring hikes to be done. Also, since Simon was headed there as well, and he’s more or less crazy, I figured I’d be in for some pretty wild adventures; I was not to be disappointed.

Huaraz sits at the base of the Cordillera Blanca in central Perú. Its elevation is about 3,080m (10,254 ft: once again 1 foot = 3.25 meters) and dwarfed by the towering peaks to the East that rise to elevations of over 6,000m. In very simple terms, it’s as dramatic a mountain setting as one could wish for. My intentions upon arriving in Huaraz were to do two major treks. One in the northern part of the Cordillera Blanca which passes through the northern base camp of Alpamayo (often called “The Most Beautiful Mountain in the World”) and the other around the Cordillera Huayhuash to the south. Bones had told us that both were incredible hikes, but that the Huayhuash trek was truly “world class”, which happens to be his definitive classification for anything he thinks is really cool (e.g. “these rat ribs are truly world class”). Given that endorsement, we decided to undertake the Huayhuash trek first and foremost; I am glad we did as a few days after returning I fell ill with a throat infection and was unable to do any more trekking in Perú.

Anyway, after dorking around in Huaraz for a few days (during which time I went on a small, warm-up day hike to the awesomely named Laguna 69), we finally got our act together and started preparing for the trip. This entailed buying a map, talking to a few guides about the trails, planning our route (Simon wanted to do as much of the “walk” as possible “off-track”), and purchasing our supplies at the central market. After that we went back to the hostel (Jo’s Place: run by a very English, very stuttering man named Jo and his Peruvian wife, Vicky) and began fastidiously packing our bags with the absolute minimum amount of gear (”do I really need a change of underwear?”, “is it worth carrying toilet paper?”, “do you think we can make it on just one bottle of fuel?” - the answer to all previous questions was “no”). After paring down everything we were bringing to a barebones kit, we hefted our bags and figured they weighed around 21kg (46lbs), or just plain heavy. However, given that we were uncertain of exactly how many days the trek would take (10-12) or whether or not we would be able to purchase any food along the way, there wasn’t a single item we were taking that we could afford to leave behind.

This map is of the Cordillera Huayhuash, where we were trekking. The blue line is the route we followed and the pink squares are where we made camp. We followed the route traveling clockwise.

As opposed to writing a play-by-play account of the trek, which would drag on for pages and pages, I will instead attempt to give you (our readers) something of an idea of what the experience was like. Let me begin with a rough description of the route: As you can see from the map above, we were circumnavigating the entire Huayhuash range (a feat which took us 10 days). The entire trek took place at an altitude of over 4,000m and well above timberline. Each day (with one exception, the first afternoon) we had to cross a pass of 4,300m or higher (two were over 5,000m) and on one particularly difficult day we had to cross two. With one or two exceptions (such as when we spent the night on a pass called Punta Taipush at 4,850m) we camped at the side of high-alpine, glacially-carved lakes. There were a few human settlements, most consisting of one or two stone huts perched just below some insanely high pass or isolated at the end of a long, steep valley. Once we passed through a legitimate town, Huayllapa, and barely missed the tiny town of Huayhuash.

This photo was taken from Punta Taipush:

We were trekking with the use of a relatively accurate map, dubious advice from locals, and some trekking notes taken from two trekking books; one was Lonely Planet Trekking in the Central Andes and the other was Peru and Bolivia, 8th: The Bradt Trekking Guide. Both of these books had “alternate routes” that were more challenging, more spectacular, and less traveled – we took these options whenever offered. As a result, well over half of the trek was done either on less traveled routes, cattle trials, or on trails we made ourselves as we scrambled up and over rocky, unmarked passes.

Here is a photo taken during just such a scramble (on Day 7). Below you can see Laguna Sarapococha and in the distance and to the right, a pass we crossed the morning before. The lake below lies at the foot of Siula Grande which those of you familiar with climbing lore will recognize as the mountain on which Joe Simpson had the ordeal about which he later wrote the book Touching the Void. It has also been made into a movie, which was filmed on location, and which I highly recommend. Living at the end of the valley is the family which carried Joe back to civilization on a mule. They proudly showed us an autographed copy of the book.

In general, we would start the day at the bottom of a pass and try and get up and over the pass before noon so that the afternoon was usually a long cruise to the bottom of the next pass where we would make camp and prepare for the next morning’s pass. The terrain was incredibly rugged, as one might expect of the high Andes, with towering peaks and deep, winding valleys. But, that said, the trails, when we followed them, were well traveled as people have been living in these areas for hundreds of years. Once or twice a day we would pass a shepherd with his flock of goats or sheep and with the same frequency one of the simple houses I mentioned above.

Here is me with Cerro Rasac in the background – the mountain was so huge, that when one sits at its base, such as we did for lunch one day, and looks up, the sensation that it could come toppling over on top of you is surprisingly real:

The locals were friendly if quiet and very reserved; we chatted with them whenever possible. We often asked them directions, and they were usually right. At one small house we were fed a lunch consisting of some delicious boiled potatoes and a glorious soup made of some very chewy mystery parts from a sheep they had slaughtered that morning. One group of men who were building a house, but were taking a aguardiente (a local moonshine made of sugar cane) and coca leaf break as we passed, shared what they had with us and wanted to trade their rubber knee high boots for our trekking ones (no, thanks). Often we were taxed as we passed through their land, not unsurprising and something we had expected.

Speaking of the directions we received from the locals, well, they told us that there was a trail over the pass shown in this picture. And, based upon our map, which had its own problems, we believed them. But once we got there it became obvious that without alpine gear, such as crampons and ice axes or at least a rope, we just couldn’t do it – the problem is getting around the rock outcropping about 1/3 up the left side of the glacier (oddly, and in contrast to every other glacier we saw, this one seems to have grown since the map was printed…):

The weather was very predictable in that the morning would start a bit cloudy and then clear as the sun came out. Then the morning and early afternoon would be nice. Usually by 2 or 3 o’ clock the clouds would appear again and begin threatening serious rain by 4:00. It never really did rain in earnest though. However, at those elevations, it’s almost always cold. I never, during the entire trip, took off my thermal long johns. As we walked, I would usually just wear pants and my thermal top. But, if the weather got a bit cloudy, or we stopped for more than a moment, I’d have my fleece jacket, wool stocking cap, and light gloves on in a flash. It was terribly dry and the only life one saw, beyond the few scattered natives and their livestock, were tufts of brown, dried grass and green lichen where there was damp earth from runoff.

Here is another picture of Rasac, taken in the early afternoon:

We rose every morning as the sun colored the sky, but while the stars were just barely visible, and I broke camp as Simon cooked porridge. Then we ate quickly and were on the trail before the sun hit it (well before 8:00). Usually, as I said before, we started straight uphill toward a pass and would reach the high point after about 3 hours. Shortly before, or at, the pass we would eat our second breakfast (cold, leftover porridge – always delicious) to keep our energy up, and then start the long descent to a valley below. Once we reached the valley we would then head uphill again toward the bottom of the next pass. After a few hours, usually around 1 or 2 o’ clock, we would stop for lunch. Then it was just another hour or two until camp and dinner. We were always in bed before 7:00. In general, we spent 7 to 8 hours a day trekking, about 11 hours sleeping, and the rest of the time either cooking, eating, or taking up/down camp. It was a … demanding schedule.

There were other groups on the trail, most of them guide and burro supported affairs (depending on the level of luxury desired the ratio varied from one guide and 2 burros per person to 3 guides and 4 burros per person). Actually, nearly everyone thought we were practically insane for doing it unsupported. We couldn’t see why you needed anything more than a map, a pack, and a willingness to suffer.

Concerning the equipment we carried: mostly it was food and the bare camping essentials. We wore most of our clothes most of the time (with heavier gear, like a wool sweater and a windbreaker, coming out at camp) and we each carried a sleeping pad and a sleeping bag (I actually carried two sleeping bags – one 3 season and 1 summer bag because I had been told it was REALLY cold at night, which it was). I carried our camping gear, which consisted of the $40 tent Micah and I had bought in Arequipa coupled with a nice $60 tarp which Micah had brought from The States as a rain fly (the combination worked amazingly well, kept us surprisingly warm and bone dry, and provided us with a large awning under which we cooked every night). Simon carried the cook kit, stove, and fuel. And that’s about all we had. Half the time we just drank the water we found if it looked clean, or boiled it or used MicroPur tablets if it looked like cows had been in the area.

This is a picture taken from inside the tent one evening as the weather threatened (the mountain is Rasac again):

The effects of the high elevation were … interesting. After the first few days, I hardly noticed that we were camping at over 4,300m. That said, the first few days I was under no illusions that the elevation was putting large demand on my body. I noticed, as we climbed higher and higher, that my coordination deteriorated in relation to the increase in elevation. My balance was off and my lower legs were wobbly while the muscles were stiff and unresponsive. Headaches were quite common, especially in the forehead (apparently your brain swells a bit), or at the base of your skull (due to dehydration). You also urinate like a sieve. One strange result I had not anticipated was a general sense of anxiousness, kind of restless and nervous – like something bad was going to happen, or you were doing something stupid but didn’t know it. Of course, breathing rates were accelerated, as were resting hear rates (the first few nights I had a hard time falling asleep due to my racing heart and sense of anxiety). In general, however, all of these effects were relatively minor and existed more as curiosities of extreme elevation than anything else.

Our diet was not particularly varied. As I said, every morning was one cup of porridge with a few pieces of dried fruit thrown in. Lunch was 2 buns of bread, 1/2 of a tomato, 1/3 of a cucumber, a hardboiled egg (for six days), and the equivalent of a single-serving, fast food packet of mayonnaise. The bread lasted 8 days and after that we used whole wheat crackers. After the eggs we managed to buy some locally made, salty cheese from Joe Simpson’s friends. For dinner we had a cup of tea, a cup of soup from a packet, and either pasta or rice with maybe a small onion and a carrot and supplemented by an Australian Army ration of dehydrated meat of which Simon had a ton. After dinner we had a small piece of chocolate and a cup of hot cocoa. The dinners were prepared by me, with Simon lending a hand, and flavored using a variety of dried spices I was carrying. We normally had about 2 cups of food for dinner.

I don’t know if that sounds like a lot food or a little, but what I do know was that while I was always ready to eat, I was never starving. Perhaps the knowledge that there was no option to eat more kept my appetite in check. Nevertheless, when I finally returned to town I couldn’t manage to eat enough. 4 meals a day just wasn’t enough and I was constantly feeding my face. This ravenous, almost frantic, hunger which consumed me lasted nearly two months after all the trekking was done (I went on another trek after this one, but back in Bolivia). It was bizarre. However, I shouldn’t be surprised, given the hours of strenuous activity and limited food. In any event, when I finally weighed myself, after the fact, I tipped the scales at 61.5kg (~135lbs). I hadn’t weighed that little since I was 17 years old, at the start of my senior year of high school, and I had never been as skinny.

Anyway, that is, more or less, what hiking the Cordillera Huayhuash was like. After returning to Huaraz we hung out for a few days to relax, climbed a small peak Cerro Churupita (5,035m), and ate a lot. Then, just when we were about to try and climb Cerro Pisco (5,760m) with an alpine guide, I fell ill and was stuck in bed for about 3 days. After that I was running out of time and chose to head south as I continued to recuperate with the hopes that I could try another trek in Bolivia on my way to meet up with Micah in (fanfare) Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

To close this long-winded post, I submit for your enjoyment the following list we compiled one night while on the trail that came out of a pun using the name of the range, Huayhuash:

Why wash:
-when every day you camp in cow shit?
-your pots when, a) the left-overs just add flavor, and b) you’re just going to mess them again?
-when your filthy clothes will just make you dirty again?
-when the only person you see all day is a dirty Aussie who doesn’t give a shit?
-when the only girls you’ll meet are shepherds?
-your hands when the guy making your food just wiped his ass with a rock and didn’t wash his?
-when packing soap just adds weight to your kit?
-when you’ll just contaminate the pristine environs?
-when nothing short of an industrial strength cleaner will make a difference?
-when you have no plans to take off your thermals for the next 10 days?
-when the exposure will give you frostbite?
-when you know the best shower in Peru is waiting for you back a Jo’s?

After the last harrowing adventure, I decided to take a break from blood-sucking bats and angry mobs, and go do something a little more touristy. In fact, the next stop for me was the single most touristed location in all of South America: Machu Pichu. Tyler had decided against accompanying me, as he’d “already been there” (spoken in a bored tone accompanied by a pretentious eye-roll.) Fine then, I’d battle the hordes of Eddie Bauer khaki-panted tour groups on my own.There are 3 distinct types of visitors to Machu Pichu. In the first group are the casual travelers, on one of the month-long trips they managed to steal by saving up vacation time or squeezing in a trip between semesters at college. They only have time for the highlights, are awed and excited by everything they see, and are generally just happy to be there. The second consists of the two-week-vacationers usually on their one and only trip outside of the United States, except for their previous visit to Europe which doesn’t count as “travel” for much the same reason that badminton doesn’t count as a “sport” (just kidding). The third are the hardcore travelers who sneer and roll their eyes pretentiously at other people’s European travel experience and won’t get out of bed for any trip less than 6 months. The two-weekers ask stupid questions of their tour guides like “Why do you people make mummies anyway?” and really “got into the whole Inca spiritual vibe” during their short visit, the hardcore travelers sigh and act put out by having to go and see such a “tourist trap” and talk about how no one knew Machu Pichu existed 5 years ago except them, and the casual travelers just enjoy their 4-day trek and rush around taking photos of the tight-fitting masonry and marveling at how the Incas had managed such a feat. Usually in Eddie Bauer moisture-wicking no-wrinkle zip-off-into-shorts khaki pants.

Originally, we had planned to end our Choquiquirao trek in Machu Pichu after about 8-10 days hiking through the Andes. As the post written previously about that trek explained, the route was changed to shorten the trip mainly so we could return to Cusco in time for the rafting expedition (a fact which turned out to be in my Giardia-and-Salmonella-wracked favor). So now, I sat in Cusco debating the various methods of travel designed to get one to the actual site of Machu Pichu.

Because I’m in a listing mood, there are again three basic ways of getting to Machu Pichu. The first (and easiest) is the train. The ride takes only a few hours, but even the cheapest class of service is quite expensive. The second is the Inca trail method. In order to hike the Inca Trail, one must go with a guided tour, and pay exorbitant fees for the service of having most of your gear carried for you and all meals provided for the 3-5 day trek. The third method is the one that I wanted to take, which is to walk to the site.

No secret outside the location of the Lost City of Gold is more closely guarded in Peru than detailed information about how one can walk to Machu Pichu without paying the train fees. At least, that’s how it seemed to me, having spent almost a week in Cusco both recuperating from the last vestiges of Giardomonella (as I’ve taken to calling the combo) and the raft trip without finding any info whatsoever. I’d spoken to a number of different travelers elsewhere who knew someone who had, or had spoken to someone who told them how, etc., but had yet to actually encounter any firsthand specific info on the route. So, having passed 4 days already taking care of various chores and wasting time in Cusco, I decided to simply take the train in the interest of time.

I had just returned to my hostel after purchasing the cheapest tickets possible (which required that I catch a bus to a town halfway to Machu Pichu and pick up the train from there), when I happened to start a conversation with some Irish girls staying there about Machu Pichu and my plans. When I mentioned that I had been looking for the walking route, they directed me to the guest book at the hostel, which contained a recent entry detailing everything about how to do it, from bus times to walking distances, crude maps and all. Great.

My scheduled time to meet the train in Ollantaytambo (just give the pronunciation a try on that one) was at 9:00 at night, so I caught a bus there in the early afternoon to spend some time looking around. Finally, in the dark, I stood at the closed chain link gates that kept people off the platform with a large group of people waiting. At 9ish, the train rolled in and they opened the gates for all of us to flood on. At 11:15, we arrived in Aguas Calientes, the town at the base of the mountain on which Machu Pichu sits. I, thinking I was so much smarter than everyone else, instead of checking the hostels right near the tracks decided to go much further up the one main street that winds up a hill, lined with hotels and hostels, figuring they would be cheaper the further away from the platform one went. What I didn’t realize was that the other end of the street eventually wound up at the hot springs themselves (aguas calientes meaning “hot waters” in Spanish), and thus the further one went the pricier lodging became. Once I realized this, it was already too late as most everything even remotely approaching my price range (I wanted to pay less than 10 soles, or 3$, they wanted to charge no less than 30$) was now full. Facing the prospect of either paying 50$+ at a nice hotel that may have a room left or walking out into the jungle and sleeping under a log (towards which I was leaning rather than a hefty room rate), I eventually wound up talking to a young Peruvian girl who was trying to entice me to come and drink at the bar she worked in. Asking about cheap lodging, she directed me across the river, to the part of town where the locals lived.

I finally found a hostel across the river within my price range. I had to sleep on a mattress on the floor in the lobby, but the price is what counts. By that time it was 1:00 or so anyway, and I intended to leave town to head up to the ruins at 4:00, so it wasn’t as if I would be using a room much anyway.

At 3:45 I was angry and confused when an incessant beeping woke me up. Soon realizing it was my alarm, I turned it off and decided that Machu Pichu simply wasn’t worth it. Higher brain functions luckily booted up before I fell back asleep and were sufficient to drag me out of bed to get moving. It was freezing cold, so I set out with my long underwear and stocking cap on, my headlamp lighting the streets as I headed out of town in the direction of the steps leading up the mountain to the ruins themselves.

The hike takes about an hour, climbing essentially straight up an endless series of steps. Along the way I passed other nutjobs also trying to arrive at the top before the sun came up, most panting in the high altitude and extreme exertion. I arrived at the top at 5:15 or so, 45 minutes before the park actually opens and they let people in. No one told me that.

At 6:00, the gates opened and people rushed in to grab spots quickly before the sun, threatening with every passing minute to break over the ridge to the east and catch us in a non-perfect position to view its dawning majesty. It was like the day after Thanksgiving at the mall or something, everyone running and pushing to get to any place better than the paved walkway in. I believe I may have pushed an old lady down, but I can’t really remember in the red haze of bloodlust. So, arriving breathless at what I deemed to be a fairly decent position, far away from everyone else, I proceed to sit and hurriedly prepare my cold instant coffee and tear open my pack of biscuits so I could be sitting serenely enjoying my breakfast when the sun finally crested the ridge. Serenely I waited, slowly crunching my biscuits and sipping ice cold coffee, and waited, and waited. Turns out the sun doesn’t actually poke its stupid little face up over the mountains until 7, 7:15, so all of us sat there for an hour holding our breath. But boy howdy, was it worth it. Well, actually I don’t really think so, but after waiting an hour in the cold with a crappy coffeesicle and a whole pack of biscuits gurgling away in my gut, I choose to remember it as such. Decide for yourself:

The next few hours proved quite enjoyable, as aside from the hundred or so people who’d managed to drag themselves up to the ruins so early, I had the place to myself. In a site of that size, even a hundred people become scarce, and I wandered around virtually alone except for a few random encounters with others. I had fully expected to be completely disappointed by Machu Pichu. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised to discover myself truly blown away. The ruins themselves are interesting, but the location makes it spectacular. High up on a ridge, the site looks hundreds of meters down on the crashing Urabamba river (which those of you with a knack for remembering random Quechua words read in passing only once will recall is the same river we earlier rafted down, albeit much further downstream). The main site starts up on a high hill and descends down onto the large, flat saddle of the ridge, the whole area overlooked by the towering spire of Huayna Pichu. The latter is climbable, via a 20-45 minute climb up narrow stairs hewn into the rock.

At 10:00 or so, I decided it was time to make that climb to the top of Huayna Pichu. 20 minutes later I stood on the top, exploring the small set of ruins that sits up there. Feeling a bit hungry, I sat on the edge of a sheer rock wall and ate my lunch, looking down on the main ruins.

From my vantage point on high, I could see the road winding back and forth up the mountain from Aguas Calientes, and the long line of buses climbing it. The standard tour (for two-weekers) begins in Cusco with the early morning train, which is met by buses which then ferry tourists up to the site. They arrive in droves at around 11, a site I could see from my perch far above. Flooding into the ruins by the main gate came thousands of people, soon occupying every inch of the site. After snapping countless photos and following their tour guides around for 3 hours, they begin their mass exodus around 2 to catch their buses and later the train back to Cusco. By 3, the place is quiet again, albeit still much fuller than before the groups arrived. Knowing the schedule in advance, I stayed up on Huayna Pichu until 1:45 or so before descending again. Even then, I caught the tail end of the rush, and had to wait somewhat impatiently for groups to slowly work their way through the site as the tight spaces didn’t leave me any passing room. At least I had the distinct pleasure of hearing multiple different tour guides describing the same things, each giving a completely different account of the history and purpose of any given room or object. Standing by a small stone alcove for any length of time, one would hear descriptions of its purpose ranging from shrine to the jaguar god to outhouse.

So, after spending a few more hours wandering around and taking a few more photos, I finally called it a day and returned to Aguas Calientes. I spent the night at the same hostel, and caught the train the next day back to Ollantaytambo and a bus from there to Cusco. To end, here are a few more shots of Machu Pichu and some long-haired hippy.

Given the length of Ty´s last post, I decided to wait a few days for our readership to digest his tales of adventure before I went ahead and wrote my next one which is so much cooler than his, it will crush his post´s head and eat its soul. Again, I apologize in advance to my mother and grandmother for the danger content in this post. After this one, there won´t be any more tales of near-death. Just jaguar attacks. (You´ll see).As Kat and I peke-peked away from the rest of the group, we expected a nice, easy, relaxing journey downriver and out of the jungle. This turned out to not be the case, although the first few days were actually quite pleasant.

The man who owned the peke-peke, despite the arrangement worked out ahead of time, decided halfway on our voyage to Sapahua not to go any further. This is probably due to the fact that he stopped at his house in a small community along the river for lunch, and had apparently encountered something, most likely in the form of a wife, which convinced him it was a bad idea to go the rest of the way downriver with us. He told us that around the corner there was another boat we could catch, leaving shortly.

This change of plans actually worked out for the best, as the boat around the corner was not a public boat, but a private one loaded up with government workers travelling downriver to check on various development projects that they were working on with the locals. They agreed to take us with them (in spite of and not as a result of anything I did, but rather due to Kat´s friendly interest in their plans and works). Soon, we were motoring downriver in a fast boat with a cover overhead to keep off the sun, eating olives and hard-boiled eggs they were passing around.

The men in the boat were all working on a few different projects, but had teamed up to save time and gas, and because they apparently shared a common interest in olive-and-hard-boiled-egg-eating. After a short trip downriver, we stopped at a small community to check on one of those projects. In this community (which may have been called Nuevo Luna, Nuevo Mundo, or something else starting in Nuevo), they were trying to start a small agricultural project, designed to allow the locals to grow fruit first for their own consumption, and later to sell. We went with the guys up to the village as they explained the project and checked in on it to see how it was coming.

In one of the villages, the men in the boat agreed to take on board another passenger and carry him downriver. Whomever made this decision apparently didn’t care that the man was stumbling drunk, and was completely unconcerned by the way he proceeded to sit in the bow and try to fall overboard at every major opportunity. While sitting there, which put him in close proximity to us, he would every now and again suddenly take notice of us yet again, and having forgotten that he’d spoken to us only moments before, would be surprised to find two gringos on board the boat with him and begin much the same conversation we’d just finished mere moments before. At one point, he told us in a voice rife with incredulity, that perhaps the two of us, being gringos, would take interest in the fact that further upriver there were apparently a bunch of gringos on balsa wood rafts trying to float down! Could we believe it!! Our fame had apparently preceded us.

We continued downriver, stopping occasionally. As it began to grow dark, we realized we wouldn´t actually be able to make it all the way to Sapahua that evening. Not too worry, the government guys were going to stop in Nuevo Luc (where Tyler and the aussies later stopped as well), and would help us find a place to stay and food, and take us further downriver the following day. One of the guys on the boat, a young peruvian named Carlos (like roughly 60% of peruvians), was supervising a big project in the community to set up a system to deliver clean water, and as such had spent a fair bit of time in the community. He took us under his wing and made all of our arrangements for us. Our stay in the community was very pleasant, playing volleyball with the locals, bathing in the river in the dark of night under the stars (after first throwing rocks into the water to scare away stingrays or anacondas or whatever might be waiting to eat, sting, or otherwise disable us), and drinking chicha (luckily only discovering after I drank 4 glasses how its made).

The next morning, a long, low dugout canoe with a big peke-peke engine on it took us downriver through the early morning fog as the sun rose blood-red over the Urabamba to Sapahua. Upon arrival, we immediately caught a public boat downriver 8 more hours to Atalaya, the next major city on the river (although “major” means it had mud streets and hotels, and a few decent restaurants). We ended up spending a day in Atalaya, recovering from the arduous river journey.

From Atalaya, the original plan was to keep heading downriver to Pucallpa, from which we would head out to Lima. However, the only boat that could take us there, didn’t leave for 4 days, and then would take another 2. However, there was another option, which we decided to take. At Atalaya, another river called the Tambo comes in from the west, and a short 8 hour ride up the river to a city called Puerto Colpa would put us at the first point reached by roads, from which we could catch first a taxi and then a bus over to Lima. This seemed reasonable.

A full day later, we arrived in Puerto Colpa, and upon disembarking from the boat, we encountered our first hints of trouble. The locals on the bank helping people get off the boat told everyone that there were no cars going to Satipo at the moment, (Satipo being a fairly large city, with a paved road and regular bus service to Lima). The problem was apparently that there was some sort of trouble, blockades, on the rough dirt road leading there. When I heard the words blockade and trouble, my sphincter clenched a little. After the two previous experiences I’ve had with blockade-running, I had no desire to ever be involved in that sort of adventure again.

The boat we had come upriver with was packed with a large group of older women from Atalaya, trying to get to Lima for a shopping expedition, and they were all quite upset at not being able to go further. However, as necessity is the mother of opportunistic greedy profiteers, a man began arranging to take a truckload of people and try to get through the blockades. He owned two small 4×4 toyota trucks, and soon had them filled with people standing in the back clutching to the roll-bars built over bed, Kat and I included. I had a bad feeling, but the man seemed very confident that we could get through without trouble. If I ever see him again, I’m going to have to have a short talk with him that may end in my losing a piece of footwear up a part of his body normally reserved for exiting only.

We bumped along a dirt track which can only be called a road if one has either never seen one, or is insane. I spent a fair bit of time trying to talk with a young military recruiter who was coming back from a trip to the river with two new young draftees in tow, as I struggled to remain on my feet in the pitching bed of the truck as it brute-forced its way over the potholes and giant ruts which threatened to swallow the truck at every turn. He pointed out the interesting sites along the way, such as the giant coca plantation on a hillside which he only pointed to surreptitiously and told me about under his breath. It began to get dark, but so far things seemed to be going just fine.

After a couple of hours, we came to a spot where some large trees had been dragged across the road to block it, but no one was around. All the men in the truck piled out to move them, and I had been helping for only a minute or two when I noticed the army guy was standing by the truck with his pistol held inconspicuously behind his leg, ready to use as he scanned the hillsides around. Either he knew something I didn’t, or he just felt more comfortable with pistol in hand (he is from the military after all). The road cleared, we continued on in the dark.

4 hours passed in this way before we came to a town whose name I can’t recall. It begins with the letter M, and sits just 20 kilometers short of Satipo (from which we’d be home free), but I suppose the name doesn’t make much difference. It’s merely the setting for the most frightening night of my life.

As we began entering the town along a road with small houses along the sides, we soon saw we we’re going to have problems. Ahead of us was a long line of trucks and other vehicles, stopped and turned off. From my previous experiences with roadblocks, I figured that meant we wouldn’t be getting through any time soon. In the town, there were only two bridges crossing a river which divided the town in half, and the blockaders had control of both of them, and no one was getting through. The reason for the conflict is relatively unimportant, being a very local issue regarding which of two states would have ownership of the dinky little town, but whatever the reason the result was our driver unloading his human cargo in the dark night and hightailing it back the way he’d come. Kat and I were left standing in the road with giant backpacks on, not really sure what to do next. The people we’d ridden with began moving off to see if they could get through, so gathering a small group for safety’s sake, we headed down the road toward the bridge. Peopl standing in the street began warning us not to go further, that there was trouble on the bridge and it wasn’t safe. We went only a little further, until 3 blocks from the bridges, before we could see that they were right. There was a fair bit of commotion further along, and stories among the people milling about began to contain violence. We were with a couple of older ladies at this point, and they wanted to get a hotel for the night and wait it out till morning. Roadblocks are much less dangerous during the day, so we decided this was a good idea and went with them. Unfortunately there were no hotels in the city, particularly not on the side of the river we were on, so we were left with the option of trying to find someone to let us stay with them, or trying to walk out of town back the way we’d come. Luckily just then a different group of ladies from our boat saw all of us and told us that the woman in a house had said they could stay, and invited us to join them. The house was basically a large shack, rough wooden walls and floors, what furniture there was was simple and basic. It had two floors and was divided into 4 rooms (two upstairs and two downstairs), with a fairly large backyard. It turned out all the ladies, perhaps 15 in all, had all holed up in this place, so Kat and I sat on the floor and chatted with them. We had no food, but the woman who lived in the house with her sister and her sister’s children cooked us all a dinner of rice, fried eggs, and yucca. Things seemed to be going just fine, and we anticipated an uncomfortable but safe night sleeping on the wooden floor.

The position of the house actually turned out to be quite important, as it was situated at the crux of the coming problems. Situated on a corner, 100m in one direction led to the main bridge through town, and roughly 200 m along the other road led to the other bridge, both of which were blockaded. As such, the house sat at the crossroads of the two problem areas.

Around 11 the first trouble started. We had all just stretched out and began trying to sleep when we heard explosions and people running and shouting in the streets. I peeked out the door to see people running back along the road away from the main bridge. Questioning people yielded uncertain answers, something about a truck or two trying to run the blockade and being attacked with dynamite, possibly more. The sounds of shouting and more explosions sounded from the bridge, but I couldn’t see anything from my vantage point. Despite the hissed imprecations from the crouching ladies in the room to stay inside, I ventured out carefully to see what I could find out. In the distance I could see fires and running men, and not much more.

After learning nothing more than that the troubles had escalated for some reason, I retreated back inside to wait. Keeping watch at the door, peering through cracks in the rough planks, I watched the confusion for awhile till it subsided somewhat after a half hour or so. I went back to where Kat and I had spread our sleeping pads in preparation for the night, and assured her that it seemed to be over now. A half hour passed, when suddenly the shouting rose again, more explosions this time, interspersed with smaller pop-pops that could only be gunfire. I again slipped quietly to the door to peer out, opening it a small crack to inquire of the people outside what was happening. There were more people in the streets now, some running away from the conflict, others running to meet it. The woman who owned the house and some other people standing cautiously outside said something about the police arriving, having brought a tank and teargas. They apparently needed the armor, as the blockaders numbered roughly 400, and were fighting back now with rocks, dynamite bombs, and molotov cocktails. The fighting outside raged down at the bridges, until finally the blockaders began streaming by as they apparently fled. A man stopped and began yelling, rallying the troops, arresting the retreat and gathering a large enough group to turn and charge back to the fight, picking up rocks and lighting molotov cocktails as they ran. The sounds of battle would recede down the street to the bridges, before swelling again as the blockaders continutally fell back to regroup before returning to the fight, and in the relative silence when the fray fell distant, the only sounds in the room were the ladies crouched behind a desk in the far corner of the room, whispering prayers to the virgin mary to save them. The mostly dark room was lit fitfully by flickering firelight from a large conflagration burning at the crossroads, made of tires taken off trucks waiting to get through. I went and sat by Kat in the dark, the role of strong, brave man somehow falling on my unworthy shoulders. I’ve discovered that it’s quite difficult to maintain a veneer of calm, confident strength when one feels anything but, but I did my best. During one particularly long period in which the commotion seemed sufficiently distant, we decided to try to get some sleep, and everyone else tried to do the same. Suddenly, we were startled by a new commotion, this one by the people downstairs in the house we were in, yelling loudly about something. The commotion spread, running feet outside and yelling, something about water and the word “bomba”. The house swarmed like a kicked anthill, and I tried frantically to get information out of anyone passing by, but no one had time to explain what was happening to the gringo. A few hurried snatches of information revealed that a bomb had rolled into the house downstairs, and the shouts for water indicated that they were trying to smother it. Should we get out? Was it going to go off? No one would answer, so I ran to Kat (whose spanish was just insufficient enough that she had no idea what was happening, and as such stood in the center of the room calmly), waiting at any moment to be torn apart by a blast from downstairs. Before I reached her, I was seized as my throat and eyes began stinging profusely, and my previous experiences with teargas made clear in an instant what was going on. The bomb downstairs was a teargas bomb, and everyone shoved whatever fabric they could find over nose and mouth as the room began to fill with the noxious fumes. The minutes ticked by in agony, till it slowly cleared, and one could breath without the benefit of improvised gas masks. Someone brought water, and we splashed some on our faces to rinse off the burning chemicals. In the aftermath of this new development, we sat on the floor truly frightened, listening to the continued sounds of battle outside, hoping for light and the possible end of the conflict. The conflict remained at a distance for a tense hour, until finally I felt confident enough to tell Kat she should try to get some sleep, that I would keep watch. It was probably 3:30 in the morning, and we were exhausted. I tried to stay awake, listening for any sounds that might indicate trouble coming, only to repeatedly start awake as the battle raged closer again to realize I’d fallen asleep. Finally, at around 4:30, the sounds died down, even in the distance, to the point where a peruvian guy who had holed up with us ventured out to see what he could find out. He returned some time later with the news that the police had been defeated and fled, and that the blockaders had told him we could pass. A quick assessment of the situation told me that the risks of trying to pass in the dark were outweighed by the safety offered by crossing in a large group of peruvians, mostly older ladies, and Kat and I quickly got our gear put away and backpacks on. At around 5am, in the dark, we all set out in a group towards the main bridge. Kat and I stayed near the center, trying to be as inconspicuous as one can be with a giant backpack on, as gringo as they get in the middle of a remote part of Peru, as we approached the bridge. We began passing large groups of men standing and drinking around burning fires, their ranks becoming denser as we approached the bridge and the main concentration of them, all yelling and celebrating their recent victory. Every muscle in my body was tensed, ready for attack, my pack straps unclipped and the whole setup ready to be ditched if we needed to run. They were shouting things at us, and after a few moments I managed to seperate out enough individual threads to realize that most were shouting “Tranquilo! Pasa, no mas!” (roughly “Calm, go ahead and pass”), but there were enough angry shouts about “gringos” and “extranajeros” that I didn’t relax until we’d passed over the bridge, and roughly 300m beyond without incident. On the way, we walked pass the police tank, now unoccupied and abandoned. In a plaza further along, we found taxis willing to take us further, and 20 exhausted minutes later, we arrived in Satipo, a large city where no effects of the problems only 15k down the road were felt at all.

I’ve learned a lot in my travels, and one of the most important lessons has been about the nature of mobs and violence. The same person that would ordinarily smile and shake your hand, might just as easily use those hands to throw rocks or worse when caught up in the frenzy of an angry mob. Twice now, I’ve been in danger at the hands of mobs, but I wouldn’t want to paint a picture of South America as land of open warfare in the streets. My experiences have been the result of bad luck, combined with bad decisions, decisions which ignored common sense and my instincts. Violence associated with political protest is not a characteristic exclusive or even inherent to South America. I’ve been teargassed three times in my life, and one of those three was in San Francisco protesting the Iraq War. On the other hand, I’ve walked past countless political protests in Argentina and other countries which were entirely peaceful, where I was in no danger. Regardless of where I am in the future, I’ve learned that large groups of people with heightened passions are highly unpredictable and dangerous, and best avoided.

This post has absolutely nothing to do with recounting tales of travel but is instead a request for any and all information any of you may have concerning Brazil (which happens to be where we are right now - Rio de Janeiro, which rocks). The country is immense and we need some way of deciding between all of the myriad options on our way North. So, once again, if you have any travel advice (from places you loved, places you hated, or places that Dave the annoying accountant manager wouldn’t shut-up about when he trapped you at the coffee machine) please pass it along as it all proves invaluable. Thanks a million.(A note to those who have clicked on our ads, thank you. We’ve made $76.45.)

Well, after the whirlpool of the night before impolitely ate one of our rafts whole and Micah and Kat segued, as a result, off to persue their respective interests (Kat’s being her boyfriend in Cusco and Micah’s laying somewhere in the depths of the Bolivian jungle), I was left pondering my fate and eyeing my balsa askance as the two of them disappeared downriver. In the middle of said contemplation is when I snapped this last photo of Micah.”And I’m out!”

From this point out it was just me, the two Aussies, an our balsas – for better or for worse. Figuring we still had a few more days yet before we reached our stated destination (the distant town of Sepahua, somewhere downriver), we quickly loaded up our rafts and took to the river - where we proceeded to spend the next 6 hours alternately laying on our backs (lulled into a tropical daze by the scorching sun, impenetrable banks of dark jungle, cool water, and thousands of birdcalls all competing for our attention; one could almost listen to them all at once, like a grand Amazonian Symphony, if one concentrated with all his might) when the water was moving, and paddling for long stretches of calm water when the river spread out in the increasingly flat Amazonian Basin, came to a near standstill, and looked more like a never-ending lake than a river.

Here’s a 1st person perspective of the balsa, so now you know how it feels (yes those are my paddles and bamboo poling pole):

The next few days passed ever more slowly as the river continued to slow and grow. Rapids were things of the past (with the exception of a low hanging snag that knocked me off my raft in a moment of carelessness and claimed my bandana - which I’m still angry about) and small communities started to appear with greater frequency along the banks of our mud-colored slug of a jungle highway.

A local community on the river (probably with a name something like Nueva Vida):

All of the communities we passed had been “missionized” as we called it, meaning that missionaries had converted the people and the priest was a big man in town. It left us all a bit sad, seeing their culture “corrupted” as it were.

Every morning we woke at first light, made breakfast (Bones is a master of porridge making and I have rarely eaten better for “brekkie” than I did on this trip - the fresh plantains helped), struck camp, tied our things to our rafts (a science in and of itself), and took to the water for a picturesque early-morning drift. The water was always as calm as only early morning water can be and the mist over the river combined with the early, whirling calls of the birds and the cotton-soft light of the sunrise to create a truly idyllic jungle dawn:

As the sun kissed the river for the first time, the atmosphere of the jungle would change, becoming more intense. The new birds coming on shift as the graveyard crew went off were much more insistent with their calls - from the cacophony of the Macaws and the strange stone-dropped-into-a-deep-well of the Oripendula (a beautiful russet bird with a bright yellow beak and tail that live in giant hanging nests) to the incredible falling thrill (like someone dragging their fingers down the keyboard of a synthesizer) of an unidentified songmaster, The Symphony would begin in earnest.

This was when the day would start to warm up and I would feel like doing some paddling, not having wanted to disturb the previous stillness. Often we were barely within sight of each other - the distances changing constantly as each of us chose a superior line around a corner or through a small race of rocks - but generally knew where the others were. The long stretches of flat water began to try my patience as I soon discovered that my raft was not only the heaviest of the three, but also veered so strongly to the right that I had to paddle 5 times on the right to every 2 on the left. This was very tiring. Usually the flat stretches required from 30 to 45 minutes of paddling before they would finally relent, turn a corner, and speed up to let you rest a bit before the next still-water doldrum. I found myself longing for the adrenaline charged, I-could-drown-quite-easily-here rapids of further upstream.

In the mid-afternoon things would get hot, really hot. It was too hot for the birds to sing, too hot for the river to move faster than a slow, geriatric stroll, and too hot for me to be stuck on that raft. But there we were, and we had miles to travel, so we would dunk ourselves in the murky water from time to time, try and keep our skin (sensitized to the sun by the malaria medication we were taking - doxycycline) covered, chat the hours away discussing everything from bizarre sexual positions (The Reverse Bone-a-rama, which Craig discovered) to the socio-political problems posed by a capitalist driven 1st world living a life of luxury while supported by the silent, suffering poor of the 3rd world, and usually paddle and paddle and paddle.

As the sun eased it’s way toward the horizon we would begin looking for a suitably perfect beach stretched lazily along the side of the river and taking up the margin left between the dark brown water and the murky green jungle with a creamy streak of inviting sand. We never had to look long:

At this point we would drag our rafts up onto the wide, cool beach (usually making a table, bench, and jetty for washing dishes out of them), set up our tents, gather wood, and start the preparations for dinner. We had two pots and we cooked our dinners (pasta or rice with fresh vegetables and spiced to perfection by yours truly) and evening tea over the open fire as the sky grew dark and the birds gave way to the frogs as they started up their raucous nighttime racket.

Then, as the stars came out (later to be blotted away by an impossible moon hanging so swollen in the sky I feared it would drop down on top of us) and the fire died away to embers (which we left for the morning fire), we stretched out in the sand, told old stories, and then slowly trickled off to our sleeping bags to be carried away by the croaks of toads and the trills of night birds.

We continued like this for 3 more days – but it was timeless.

The last night a thunderstorm rolled over us, breaking through the cries of the night animals and the still night air to fill our tents with bright spears of lighting and loud, drum-falling-down-the-stairs crashes of thunder. And it rained. Rained in torrents. In the morning we packed quickly and without breakfast in the still-torrential rain. I could barely see the other members of the expedition through the misty curtains falling from the sky as we skittered along like butter on a hot pan across the surface of a river that seemed to be boiling beneath us.

After a few hours on the river, hunger began to gnaw and we pulled over at a village called Nueva Luz and asked a family sitting in their open air kitchen and watching the rain if we couldn’t pause there and cook our breakfast (they were more than happy to let us and watched in fascination as the crazy gringos fired up their MSR stove - nicknamed “The Rocket” - and began cooking gringo food). They even offered us chicha, a fermented sludge they drink from dusk ’till dawn, and gave us plantains for our porridge. After breakfast we thanked them heartily, gave them a few food items we didn’t want, and were about to get on our way when Bones asked if he could buy a paddle. It turned out he could. In fact, for S./15 he bought a giant, gorgeous, hand-carved paddle. Simon and I did the same. Mine was smaller, apparently made for dug-out canoes, and of a beautiful mahogany colored wood (called caoba). From there we reassumed the helms of our respective rafts and continued the rest of a cool, stormy day down the river to the small town of Sepahua where we found a hostel to stay in and a whole handful of restaurants to choose from. It was a very pleasant town with a frontier feel that fit perfectly with it’s remote river location.

Another view from the balsa, this time as we are rounding a bend. Sepahua is just around the corner:

Finally! Sepahua and time to ditch the rafts. They served great on the narrow swift waters of the Andean foothills, but a canoe is what is needed for the flats down lower:

Note on piloting a balsa:
The balsas, as Micah described, are about 15 feet long and made of either 4 or 6 logs, depending on the whims of the builder. The are tapered toward one end to make a rough bow and they weigh probably 100kg (220lbs), more or less. After a fair bit of experimentation, we found that placing your backpack about 1/3 the way from the back was the ideal location to both keep the bow raised slightly and provide you with a plethora of paddling/poling options. The classical approach, used by the locals, is to stand almost at the very back with a long bamboo pole and either push off the bottom or use the pole as a long paddle while standing (surprisingly effective). The most comfortable approach, while drifting and merely directing the raft, was to stretch out on the front of the boat with your back against your pack (this was also an effective location to paddle from as your boat didn’t veer as much). The most comfortable paddling position, however, was to sit on your bucket (strapped just behind your pack - see 1st person picture above); this position required a paddle long enough to reach the water. Finally, when the shit hit the fan and a rapid of serious boat-flipping proportions loomed in front of you, chopping and tossing like something alive and angry, the best position, I found, was in the very back, down on a knee and paddling like hell to set your line before, at the last moment, crouching behind the bucket, grabbing your pack on both sides to maintain balance, and trying to counteract the river’s attempts to capsize your rickety craft as you were shot, speeding, down the guts of a roiling white-water rapid.

- End Balsa Section -

Heart of, well, not Darkness really, but something equally as cool…

As we were drifting on our balsas down the upper Urubamba, small, secretive breaks in the banks opening to small arroyos and dark, overhung tributaries periodically caught our eye and lit our imagination. “What’s up there?” we would ask ourselves as we floated by. It is an interesting phenomenon of exploring a foreign environment, as soon as you are comfortable in your new setting, you start looking at places even more remote and unknown and wanting to see what’s there. What’s up that little river, what’s around the bend, what exactly is it here on the map where they’ve marked “insufficient information” or “Here There Be Monsters”? In any case, this was the exact thought going through my head as we looked at the giant wall-covering map hanging in the forestry concessions building in Sepahua that we had spent the better half of our one rest day looking for. It detailed the whole Río Urubamba and it’s tributaries as well as all the areas of virgin forest that had been assigned to people for logging. Stretching away into the deep forest were thousands of small snakes of river that kept splitting and splitting again as they slithered their way farther and farther from civilization. As we sat looking at the map I turned to Bones and Simon and said, “You know, I bet we could take a boat up one of these little tributaries and get into some really wild territory.” They both looked at me, smiled, and said, “Yeah, ok, I’d be keen on that.” So we started asking around.

After spending the afternoon questioning the people in town about boats and getting up the small rivers, we returned to our hostel to ask the owner who seemed to be a very knowledgeable, friendly fellow. After explaining to him our desire to explore some untouched, remote jungle he smiled and said (in Spanish), “Well, I have a small logging camp, just three loggers, about 9 hours in peke-peke up the Río Mishaua. You could go up there. It completely virgin forest. In fact, just another day up the river there’s a tribe called the Nassau that were taken out of the forest only 15 years ago. It’s extremely remote. Actually, you can go up there, hang out with my loggers and they’ll show you how to fish, make you dug-out canoes (called tarapotos), give you meat from jungle animals, and generally treat you well.” This, it seemed to us, was an opportunity we couldn’t pass up and after agreeing on a price of S./250 ($80) for all of us (to pay for the boat, driver, and fuel) we happily shook hands with Juan Lau and went about buying our provisions.

The next morning we loaded everything into the peke-peke and after a typically Peruvian delay of about an hour we were on our way back up the Río Urubamba to the mouth of the Mishaua. This tributary branched off and headed away into the forest between banks much more narrow and intimate than those of the mighty Urubamba (one of the major headwaters of the Amazon, if we didn’t mention that). The first half of the day we spent motoring up the shallow, muddy waters (the rain from the previous days having muddied them even further) past small family farms (called chakras) that became more and more infrequent as the old-growth forest slowly took control. The second half of the day we were traveling through completely untouched jungle. The wildlife was amazing. We saw huge cayman (relatives of crocodiles) sunning on the banks, thousands of birds (Great Herons being a dime a dozen, and brilliant emerald-and-white King Fishers darting along the river’s edge), a few monkeys (most having been hunted for food), river turtles, a flash of a tapir as it darted into the bush, and not a single soul. Soon the river was no more than 20m (65ft) wide and the great looming trees of the deep jungle hung over us and dipped their vines into the water.

As late afternoon firmly took hold and the heat of the day began to slake, we arrived at the logger’s camp. It was as rough and spartan an outpost as I have ever seen. The three loggers slept under tarps pitched above a few boards with nothing more than a blanket for cushion and a mosquito net to keep the bugs off. They had a very shaky table and a few beat-up old pots in which they cooked their meals. Those meals consisted almost totally of rice boiled with plantains and whatever forest animal they could manage to shoot with their shotgun, provided they could find one. When we got there they had a big bucket full of chunks of peccary - basically a wild boar looking animal. They gave us some. It was pretty good, if chewy.

Here’s the logger’s camp:

The first night we just cooked dinner, chatted briefly with the loggers who showed no reaction to our arrival other than open but quiet friendliness, and then went to sleep - the next day was canoe building day.

After getting up and eating their rice, plantain, and peccary, the loggers led Simon and I (Bones decided to do some fishing, being quite the accomplished fisherman) up and into the jungle to look for some trees to make our dug-out canoes from. They had hacked a trail through the forest that wound around from here to there and passed a number of enormous, old trees that they had already fallen and were using a somewhat portable mill to turn into boards. It was really quite sad to see what was being done to such an incredible natural resource: turning regal tropical trees into rough boards worth little more than matchsticks. Still, it was an edifying experience to see the destruction of the rain forest up close and personal, to talk with the people doing it, and to understand how and why they are driven to such deeds.

Bones fishing as we left:

Anyway, after about 45 minutes of walking and passing the giant, crashed and broken hulks (they had cut down the really big trees and left everything else as it was) we arrived in an area with a number of regal palms. Regal palms are set apart from other palms in that they have a large bulge in the trunk most of the way up the tree and a little ways below the fronds at the top. Supposedly, the outer bark is hard but the inside is very soft and spongy; we were about to find out.

The loggers (Edward was the boss, Edgar did most of the work, and the third guy didn’t really do much and we never even learned his name) went about selecting the trees and cutting them down with a precision bordering on surgical. The first tree broke right through the bulge, the second got hung up on other trees, but the third and fourth survived the fall and were prime canoe making material. (We felt a bit bad about cutting down 4 beautiful palms over 20m (65ft) high for our boats, but that was the way it went.) Edgar could wield and axe and machete like no one I have ever seen. Every stroke was placed exactly where he wanted it with an accuracy and power that were almost frightening. He worked like a man possessed and left Simon and I truly awestruck. All three of these fellows were shorter than me but with the physiques of men who have spent their entire lives working, and working hard.

In brief, the making of a tarapoto goes like this: First you cut down your palm (usually with a chainsaw, though an axe works too). Second, you trim off the ends so you just have the bulge. Third, you cut off a slice down one side of the trunk to make the channel for digging out the insides. Fourth, you use machete and axe to dig out the soft, stringy interior. Finally, you shape the bow and put on the finishing touches.

Here are the photos of them making the tarapotos and us mostly getting in the way while trying to help ( I think most of my time was spent trying to keep biting ants out of my pants and swatting at the sweat bees that kept trying to climb in my eyes and up my nose):

Simon and Edward:

Edward taking out the insides with a sharp log:

Simon and Edgar:

Edgar hacking away with his machete:

The finishing touches (about the time Bones conveniently arrived):

After fashioning our new rides, we then had to transport them back to the river (a 15 minute walk without a 300kg (660lb), or so we estimate, tarapoto on your shoulders). These three fellows just picked it up and took off down the trail saying, “Ah, no pesa mucho” (this doesn’t weigh much). The three of us tried to lift one and couldn’t even get one end on our shoulders – a very belittling experience, as Bones described it. So we decided to drag it.

Dragging the boat:

After a while the loggers came back and gave us a hand. By that I mean they carried it and we got under their feet while trying to help. Craig couldn’t help at all because he was too tall. Edgar carried one end while the other two carried the other. I think he would have gone all the way, like an Olympian, if the rest of us hadn’t faltered.

That afternoon we did a bit of fishing (catching a few delicious cat fish) and watched as the loggers securely attached the two canoes together in a rough catamaran, figuring we would probably tip over with all of our gear if they weren’t made a bit more stable. That was a good idea.

Here we are with Edgar, Edward, and the finished tarapoto catamaran:

That night we slept soundly knowing our new craft was ready and early the next morning we loaded her up and headed down river (we planned on taking 3 days).

Here’s a photo, 1st person again, of the tarapoto (I was sitting up front for most of the time):

And looking back we are treated to a lovely shot of the dirty Aussies I was stuck on the boat with:

From this point on we were paddling in style. The tarapoto catamaran was exceedingly comfortable and we could really cruise with all of us paddling. However, making good time was not our main motive as we were already where we wanted to be. As such, we spent most of the mornings paddling now and again, watching the close banks of the river slip by, and stopping wherever we saw a fishing hole so as to drop in our lines and try our luck. The wildlife continued to astonish as we were treated to eyeball-to-eyeball flybys by scarlet macaws, a few playful river otters, and the sleek, gray backs of a couple river dolphins.

Here’s a look down the river one morning:

We would usually travel down river during the morning and about the time it started to get truly hot in the early afternoon we would find one of the thousands of beautiful beaches, park the boat, and eat lunch.

The tarapoto catamaran at one of our many incredible campsites:

Craig setting fishing lines one hot afternoon:

At this beach we found some ready-made structures and had our lunch in the shade as the heat shimmered off the sand around us:

After lunch we would fish, prepare the camp, collect wood, and explore the beaches around us. There were often tapir tracks and one day I spent half an hour following some jaguar prints as they wandered through the campsite. Simon and Bones, avid journal keepers, would often write in their diaries, as Simon is doing here:

Then, as evening came on and things cooled down, we would get the fire going, set up spits for whatever fish we had caught that day, and get the water boiling as we cut the vegetables and drank tea:

We continued in this manner for a handful of days. It was perfect.

The second day we were cruising down the river, now in a more habited part of the region, when a local couple came past us in a canoe on their way to a local futbol game (there were people getting together from all along the river). We called across and asked them what the best bait for catching fish was. They responded worms. What more, if we followed them, they would take us to a place where we could get worms. That sounded fine so we pulled over to the far bank when they did and followed them up a trail and to a small chakra:

After meeting the family that lived there we followed them to their small yucca (a common root in the area similar to a hard, starchy potato) plantation and dug up a bag of worms. Afterwards, they offered us a bowl of chicha, which we hesitatingly accepted, having had plenty of experience with the foul brew before. (A word on this particular brand of chicha, as there are many types, most in the Andes made with corn. It is basically homebrew. However, this incarnation is particularly repugnant. This, as we learned later, is how they make it: They take the yucca route and chew up bites of it. They then spit this mouthful into a big press. Then they take off their sandals and squish out all the excess saliva leaving a paste. Then they ferment the paste. To serve it, the paste is taken out of it’s storage container, placed in a bowl, and mixed with water. Then you drink it. I tried to drink a whole bowl once and had to stop when my stomach turned completely sour and left me burping chicha the rest of the day. Neither Craig nor Simon decided to attempt that. Interestingly enough, the locals claim that it is absolutely necessary to have chicha to work. “Can’t work without chicha”, we were often told. Much as the locals in the Andes said they couldn’t work without coca leaves. But seriously, this is their breakfast. We couldn’t help but wonder if the consumption of chicha wasn’t a contributing factor to the number of serious machete scars we saw on so many people…)

Craig and I choking down chicha:

The mother and daughter living at the chakra:

The one armed guy cooking lunch:

The capybara (or at least that’s what I think it is), a large rodent that lives in the jungle and eats their yucca, that they gave us a large chunk of. That was very nice of them. Everyone we met was incredibly generous.

So taking our “rat”, as we called the mystery rodent, and our worms, we headed back to the river. That night we had a feast: potatoes and rat, grilled rat, and fresh catfish. I made up the rat and potatoes with soy sauce and ginger (it was delicious, incredibly tender) and Bones built a grill over the fire and cooked up a rack of rat ribs and some rat crackle as well as a catfish. We were, to use one of Bone’s favorite phrases, full as a fat lady’s knickers. Simon said it was the best meal in the wilderness he had ever eaten and I wholeheartedly agreed.

This is Simon cutting up the rat for dinner:

The rat and potatoes:

And this is the rat and fish grilling over the fire:

That night’s entertainment was digging a tick out of Simon’s thigh:

Good fun.

Well, the next evening we arrived back in Sepahua after 5 days on the Mishaua. It was, hands down, the coolest adventure I have ever been involved in. That night we camped outside of town, not yet willing to let the wilds go, and cooked our dinner over a fire. The next day Simon and I boarded a boat to take us down river to the town of Atalaya (from where we would start the long process of getting out of the Amazon and over to the mountain town of Huaraz in central Perú for some of the world’s greatest trekking) and Bones was to continue in the tarapoto for a few more days to Atalaya before heading south to Bolivia (he has set aside 3 years for exploring Latin America and as such is in no hurry). But those are all the nitty gritty details of travel that don’t make interesting stories. And, to tell the truth, this one has gone on long enough.

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:

So, the day after ditching out on Inti Lame-y we met up with a few other interested trekkers and decided that instead of doing the completely over-developed Inca Trail which runs a relatively expensive arm and leg, we decided to go on a 7 day hike (the difficulty level of which, for some reason, we never bothered to ascertain) to the supposedly equally amazing ruins at Choquiquirau and which, furthermore, drops you one day’s cheap, long bus ride from Machu Picchu (to get there from Cusco on the train is ridiculously expensive - read $52). Now, I had already been to Machu Picchu with my little sister, Michele, about 6 years ago, but I was game to go again as it is absolutely stunning. However, I was also somewhat apathetic as I had heard it had become much more touristy and expensive. Nevertheless, that was where the trek took us and I was content with that (besides the hike sounded cool, I wanted to see Choquiquirau, and it was a cheaper, more interesting way to get to Machu Picchu). Micah had put Machu Picchu at the top of his “Must Do In South America List”, which was only fair…In any event, the group that had been compiled consisted of myself, Micah, Simon, another Aussie named Craig (a.k.a. Bones - a fellow who, we were told, had spent the last 12 years living in the desert), and an English couple named Jonathan and Miriam who turned out to be completely unreliable. As it was we organized ourselves easily into groups of two and proceeded to purchase all of our food and supplies before meeting up early the next morning for the bus ride to the small town of Cachoro (Jonathan and Miriam missed the bus and that was almost the last we saw of them)…

Choqui: Day 1 - Cachoro
The first day, after catching the bus to Cachoro, we walked only a handful of hours before it started getting dark (long after I had begun to seriously question if I truly wanted to be carrying this pack, which at that point weighed about 22kg, or 48 lbs) and we made camp on some fallow farm terrace overlooking a huge gorge surmounted by snowcapped peaks. We spent the evening cooking dinner and chatting with our trekking partners with the general eagerness and enthusiasm that accompanies the start of any voyage. It was a great beginning. We didn’t take a picture. But here is one of Micah in Cachoro at the beginning of it all:

Choqui: Day 2
The second day started off beautiful and ended nothing short of Purgatorial. We were up at dawn (a ritual that has become habitual recently) and on the trail before the sun. After about an hour’s traverse of the canyon wall we crested a small rise (from where these two photos were taken), caught our first view of Choquiquirau in the distance, and then began a hellish 1,000m (3,250ft - for those of you who don’t know 1 meter = 3.25 ft (roughly) and I’ll be using meters in discussing treks because all the maps are in meters) descent through the sun-fired cactus populating the scrub-and-rock covered slopes to the bottom of the canyon far below.

Choquiquirau from a distance (yes, we have to all the way down and then all the way back up).

By the time we got there, about 4 hours later, my head was swimming, the bones in my feet were made of sharp coals, and for some reason I couldn’t see well (heat exhaustion having been a phenomena I had not previously had the delight of experiencing). After lunch at the bottom of the canyon (Simon and Craig arrived there at least an hour before us, both being in remarkable physical condition) we filled up on water, chatted with Jonathan and Miriam who arrived with all of their equipment on a hired mule just as we left, and began the ascent up the opposite side of the canyon. I had recovered poorly from the first half of the day and the only thing that kept me slogging up the hill at a pace little more than glacial, beyond an adamant refusal to admit that I was struggling terribly with a trail that Micah was waltzing up, was the fact that the only way to go was forward as there wasn’t a chance in hell that I was going back.

Here’s a photo I feel demonstrates my condition pretty well:

Slowly but surely, nursing a truly unpleasant level of exhaustion, I eked my way up the trail, pausing regularly to allow everyone else on the trail to pass me (90% of them hauling all their equipment, and sometimes themselves, on donkeys and mules - something that I would be damned if it would do). After about 4 hours and 800m of elevation gain we reached this camp site - it was a small platform that the family living there had constructed for trekkers - where I dropped, unceremoniously, into a gasping heap and watched through unfocused eyes as Micah cheerfully went about setting up camp and cooking a delightful ginger-rice dish for dinner.

Choqui: Day 3 - Choquiquirau
The next morning we were up early because we wanted to have as much of the day in Choquiquirau as we could, feeling relatively certain that Simon and Bones wouldn’t want to spend another day just hanging around. So we drug ourselves the rest of the way, another 400m of elevation and probably 3 hours of hiking, up to the terraced camp site at Choqui, set up camp next to the tent that the Aussies had already pitched and then climbed the rest of the way up to the ruins on the ridge above. When we got there Simon and Craig had already spent the morning exploring, and sleeping in (they were about as tired as we were - the previous day having been truly trying), the ruins and were on their way down as we arrived. The next few hours we spent looking around the ruins that, while impressive in their own right, still don’t compare to Machu Picchu. And anyone that claims they are just as incredible if not more so is either an idiot, blowing sunshine up your ass, or trying to sell you something. And I stand by that. In any event, here are a few of the photos we took of the site before easing our way down the trail and back to camp where we cooked an excellent pasta dinner and then fell into our sleeping bags like men half dead.

These are the best of the many photos we took of the ruins:

A house (we guess):

Some terraces:

A doorway:

I can’t really explain these:

The last photo as the sun was approaching the horizon and we were on our way down:

Choqqui: Day 4
This morning’s hike took us up through Choquiquirau (where we took a few more photos) and higher to a ridge where we found a few ruins that are still burried in forest (apparently only about 30% of Chiquiquirau has been discovered) and haven’t been excavated yet before we crossed into another valley (this was a very pleasant morning - I was feeling almost completely recovered - and we had some great views on the way) and left Choqui behind.

“So, you think your Kung-Fu is good… Well, why don’t you try some of mine.”

Unfortunately we were about 45 minutes behind the Aussies in getting on the trail (we started at 7:45) and since they both make Micah and I look like fat, 50-something accountants we didn’t see them for the next day and a half. Here’s a photo looking down on Choqui as we headed to the next valley:

Once we crossed the ridge it was another 1000m descent through dusty scrub and sun baked slopes to a river for lunch (swarmed by sand flies) where dunking my head in the ice-cold river was the only thing that stopped me from plunging once again into full-fledged heat exhaustion (whereas, Micah, on the other hand went about making lunch as if 1000m drops with a 22kg pack were simply a walk in the park - little did he know that the tables were about to turn!). From there it was another grueling 1000m ascent to the first reasonable camp site (once again at a family’s house) where we arrived just as the sun was setting (see photo) and these three young kids (next photo) helped us set up our camp. That night was absolutely gorgeous and star speckled; we stayed up late sipping whiskey and enjoying the Southern Sky (which is actually very different from that in the northern hemisphere, the Milky Way being much more pronounced).

Choqui: Day 5 - Yanama
This morning we had yet another 1000m climb to a high pass. The trail carried us up through a jungle covered slope; past a number of old, abandoned Incan mines; over a pass with an incredible view of a snow capped range; and then down to the small (really just a cluster of houses) town of Yanama where, arriving just as the sun was setting - again, we caught up once more with those Aussie bastards (them having decided to take an easy afternoon and wait for us in Yanama). This was when Micah started feeling ill, really ill.

The tip of Micah’s finger points to where we came from. You know you are on a special hike when, while setting up your tent for the night, you can look back and see where you camped the night before…

Incan mine;

The pass:

The trail to Yanama:

Choqui: Day 6
Today’s walk was supposed to be easy (only about 300m down and 1000m up). I, however, did not find it so. Nor did Micah. It started with us walking down along the valley for an hour before starting a climb up and over a saddle to another valley where we traversed for a handful of hours before slowly climbing up and into a glacial valley at about 4000m.

The morning’s walk along the valley:

The entire day Micah said barely a word and I could tell that not only was he suffering a great deal, it was taking pretty much everything he had just to put one foot in front of the other. I believe he was nursing a pretty healthy fever and periodically he would stop to spray some unfortunate patch of ground with what one might generously call diarrhea but to which we have been referring as “butt urine”. I particularly enjoyed listening to the groans of what could only have been a combination of discomfort laden with disgust. At lunch the rest of us divided us his pack to lighten his load and as the Aussies traipsed on ahead to look for a campsite I walked behind Micah to ensure that he could keep going - I was also really tired at this point still having not completely recovered from the previous days of massive elevation change. When we got to camp, in a great alpine valley surrounded by giant granite cliffs and spires - a really spectacular (or as the Aussies say “specky”) spot - Micah climbed into his sleeping bag and was not seen again until morning. The rest of us cooked dinner and had a very pleasant, if cold evening.

Choqui: Day 7 - Huancalle and out
Day 7 dawned with Micah feeling a bit recovered, if still quite ill, and a 600m climb to the 4600m pass at the end of the valley. The Aussies took off saying they wanted to get to the end of the trail at Huancalle by 4:30 (when the bus left) and that if we made it by then great and if not they would see us in Cusco (our plans had changed - we were no longer going to Machu Picchu, instead we were hurrying back to Cusco to meet up with an English girl named Kate (a.k.a. Kate Jungle, a.k.a. Kat) who had an idea for a river trip down the Río Urubamba in the Amazon Basin that we wanted to be a part of). So we ate a hurried breakfast (I had the brilliant idea of combining a bit of chocolate pudding we had left over with our morning’s porridge - an idea that while not terrible, was not particularly good either) and then marched our way up the pass with little trouble (this was the highest Micah and I had climbed in our lives to date - roughly 15,000ft).

AplineMicah on the way to the pass:

Looking down into the valley from the pass:

This was the last part of the trek. You can see the Incan road stretching along the valley floor:

From there is was a very long down-valley walk along an old, stone-paved Incan road to Huancalle, where we arrived literally moments before the bus departed on it’s cramped, dusty, 4 hour ride to the town of Quillabamba on the edge of the Amazon and where we spent a very welcome, warm, comfortable night (after a giant dinner of roast chicken - for those meat eating members of our party). The next morning we were up and on our way back to Cusco and the adventures that were awaiting us there and where Micah discovered, after various visits to the doctor, that what was ailing him was, in actuality a double-blow of Giardia and Salmonella (apparently this was the variety which causes Typhoid).

Like I said, he was really sick:

All in all it was an incredible trip: the terrain was varied, the views were stunning, the environment varied greatly from jungle and desert to alpine, and the ruins were fascinating. It was also incredibly difficult. Still, at the end, very much worth the effort.

Note:
The two Australian characters we went on this trek with deserve a bit of comment, as they play a large role in our travels for the next handful of weeks. First of all, they are both what you could pretty much call professional adventurers – adventure and exploration providing the motivating force in their lives. Simon works in outdoor education in Australia and Bones is a Bushman/Tour Guide in the Outback; they are both 37, I think. What’s more, they both spend the greater part of their time in the wilderness, travel as much as they possibly can, and the language and subject matter of which their conversations consist are nothing short of astonishingly crass. Ironically they are both quite well read, intelligent, and insightful. Micah and I took to them immediately.

Well, after the heart-stopping suspense of our blockade running, we entered Peru with high hopes (and hunched shoulders, should the blockeadores be attempting to throw any departing stones our way) for adventure, fun, and transportation systems that weren’t paralyzed by political polemics. We were not to be disappointed.Puno
Our first stop was Puno on Lake Titicaca (and yes, students of all ages have been laughing for years as they realize the non-intended pun the Incas effected when naming said lake - for those that don’t know, caca in spanish is poop - tittypoop, get it? hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha, I always laugh).

Anyway, Puno is remarkable for two reasons: 1) Being on the shore of Lake Titicaca (haha) one can easily access the fabled tourist-trap floating islands of Uros as well as two other picturesque islands called Amantaní and Taquile, and 2) Catching a bus to Puno has to be about the easiest thing in the world as every bus station you enter in Peru is full of overweight, ageless women (are they in their 20’s, or their 40’s - we don’t know) missing half their teeth and screaming at the top of their lungs “Puno, Puno, Puno” in an attempt to drown out the competition, catch your attention, and convince you that you absolutely must go to Puno, NOW!!

Well, Puno was nice if not really worth remarking much more upon. The floating islands, to which we did go even though we knew it was a tourist trap in waiting (they were “recommended” by just about everyone, albiet with caveats concerning their touristic nature and more or less luke-warmly at that), were kind of cool if totally over done and the night we spent on the Island of Amantaní sleeping in a local woman’s house to get the flavor of the place was quite nice – especially the walk to the top of the island (the lake is pretty magnificent after all, being huge, at about 3,800m above sea level, and in the middle of the high mountain desert) and the traditional/gringo party they throw for the befuddles tourists (whom they dress up in traditional garb – except us, all we got were stupid hats) every night was at least more entertaining than a Ben Afleck movie. After that we left Puno because there wasn’t anything left to do and headed north and west towards Arequipa with our packs on our backs and our thumbs in the air.

Here are a few photos from the trip:

The floating islands of Uros:

An Incan arch on Amantaní:

Sunset from the top of Island Amantaní:

And a few photos taken from Taquile:

Arequipa
The fellow driving the mine-sample truck from Juliaca to Arequipa dropped us a few blocks from the center with admonishments to hurry on our way as the sun was going down and we weren’t in the best area while at the same time slipping the 10 Sol (the Peruvian currency is the Sol (sun) and indicated like this (e.g. S./10)) note we gave him in appreciation (I wanted to give him S./5, which would have been quite generous, but Micah wanted to err on the side of generosity and so we tipped him an exorbitant amount) into his pocket and motoring away.

I don’t have much to say about Arequipa. It’s a pretty city, lots of colonial architecture, a beautiful Plaza de Armas (all Peruvian cities are built around a Plaza de Armas) with a great white church, and the people are very friendly.

Here are two photos, one of the Plaza during the day, and the other at night. We don’t really have any other photos of Arequipa.

We went to Arequipa because we heard that the Colca Canyon (near there and supposedly the world’s deepest canyon) was pretty cool and worth a visit (travel advice that I will, from here on out, debate quite emphatically with anyone who tries to make a similar claim). Well, after 2 days spent enjoying the nightlife of Arequipa and purchasing all the camping gear we were lacking (i.e. tent, stove, sleeping pads, map, etc.) for as cheap as possible – the ‘Aventura’ tent we bought cost S./140, or about U$30 (it’s awesome) – we headed out for an incredibly packed, very long, very bumpy ride to the town of Cabanaconde (Micah had the isle seat and the very dirty, wizened old man standing next to him with his crotch mere nanometers from Micah’s left check and the free end of his belt hanging loose and dangling in an obscenely suggestive and disturbing manner reeked of urine so badly I swore he must have spent the early morning cleaning latrines – or maybe he just slept in one). Well, we arrived without incident and after asking some locals where the trail went we headed out on our first trek in the Peruvian Andes – something to which I had been looking forward to for quite some time…

First, a few words on the Colca Canyon: it’s big, it’s deep, it’s dry. Beyond that, well, I’m not exactly sure how it wound it’s way onto “The Gringo Trail” except for, perhaps, clever marketing by enterprising Arequipeños. I shouldn’t criticize it too much, it is impressive and cool to see, I just wouldn’t go out of my way to visit it, which is what we did. From this point on I have become much more discerning in whose travel advice I heed.

Anyway, this trip was ill-fated to begin with because only an hour after we started I misread the map (though I refuse to accept all the blame for this, despite Micah’s repeated affirmations that it rests firmly and completely with me) and we ended up climbing an extra 400m along a trail that didn’t really exist. When we reached the top some locals asked us where we were going, laughed when we told them, and told us we had to go back down and follow a much easier trail along the valley we had just left. Shit.

Well, we did that while the sun was approaching the horizon and set up camp on the terrace of some local farm as the sun set (seen the next morning):

Then we had an unappetizing meal of bad pasta and a nearly inedible canned sauce before going to bed. In the morning Micah was ill, weak, and feverish. Now, normally I would have just told him to suck it up and quit being a little girl (not that there’s anything wrong with little girls…), but I started taking a closer look at the route we were supposed to be following and it was very quickly dawning on me that it was going to be hard. Very hard. Frankly, I knew we could do it, despite the fact that I had spent the previous 7 months sitting on my ass in Buenos Aires where my idea of exercise was a late night at a club, but I seriously doubted we would have any fun. Actually, I was pretty sure we would be exhausted the entire time. In any event, Micah’s sickness prevented us from having to consider losing face and we turned around and I loaded my pack heavy for the return few hours trip to Cabanaconde – where Micah proceeded to sit in the hotel room for two days and fart.

The first day I went on a day hike down to the bottom of the canyon (1000m down, 1000m up – very hot and very dry, but picturesque) to a tourist trap called Oasis or, alternatively, Paraiso. I avoided it and ate lunch by the river. Still, it was a nice day walk.

Here’s a view of the canyon from somwhere around a third of the way down:

The next day Micah still wasn’t feeling well and, having been relatively unimpressed by the Cañón del Colca (or Caca Canyon as I was calling it at this point), we decided to give up on the whole idea and return to Arequipa. Which we did. And which was a good decision, in hindsight, because Micah took a few more days to feel like himself again. By that point we were in Cusco: Tourist Mecca of South America.

Cusco
Cusco, for those who don’t know, was the capital and heart of the ancient Incan Empire. It’s a very interesting, pretty city with lots of history and more tourists per square meter than anywhere else on earth (a statistic I’ve just conveniently invented). There are a number of cool old churches (built by the Spanish out of stones taken from the Incan buildings they destroyed), some shattered old ruins and walls (the Spanish again), lots of interesting colonial architecture and cobblestone streets, a number of pretty plazas, and a whole host of ruins nearby that were once the crowning achievements of an incredibly sophisticated culture that were demolished by, once again, the Spanish. You begin to get the sense, hanging out in Cusco, that the Spanish were real bastards.

The Plaza de Armas and one of the many Cathedrals:

Anyway, we spent about a week in Cusco wandering around town, visiting some museums (the Pre-Colombian Art Museum is world class), and looking at some ruins when our busy party schedule (actually, my busy party schedule because Micah was avoiding drink due to his continuing health woes – although relatively abated) permitted. Also for those who don’t know, Cusco bumps all night, every night.

The major local ruins we visited:

Tambomachay (apparently a temple to water, depending on who you ask):

Puca Pucara (a fortress):

Sachsayhuaman (or, as we pronounced it, Sexy Woman - thank you Mike Klein):

After about a week of indulging Cusco and trying really hard to be impressed by the Incas and their achievements but managing little more than an intrigued curiosity – compared to other achievements around the world, we felt, what the Incans managed in the mid 14th century really wasn’t all that incredible. They built some impressive walls out of stone and put some roads through mountains that only a crack-brained fool would suggest, but come on, they didn’t even figure out the wheel… In any event, the day after my birthday on the 21st we met up with Simon (“Escape from La Paz”) and began planning another attempt at Peruvian trekking – hopefully with better results this time.

The next day was Inti Raymi, or the traditional Incan Celebration of the Sun. We tried to go watch it but were so inundated with tourists touting U$1,000 cameras that instead we went to a bar and enjoyed it from a distance. It was pretty lame and totally over tourist-ified. Frankly, I think celebration exists solely as a tourist attracion. Maybe if we had been out with some indigenous people instead of sandwiched between Frank and Rose from Minnesota and trying to peek over the heads of Hans and Olga from Hamburg the experience would have been more genuine.

Well, that takes us through the majority of our somewhat aimless wandering in Southern Peru. From this point on we got our act a little more together and started putting together some truly great adventures. However, those will have to wait until further updates…

Note: This post tells the story of our escape from the political problems that effectively shut down Bolivia for a period of several weeks, roughly 2 months ago now. The post contains scenes of Tyler and I in no small amount of danger, and as a result I would like to inform our mothers and grandmothers that the following account is entirely fictional, and didn’t really happen. To everyone else, what follows is entirely true, and scary. In order to give the reader a proper account of our escape from La Paz, it would be wise to first approach the story with a brief explanation of the problems from which we were fleeing. Many of you already know what happened there, but for those who don’t, I’ll attempt to draw a quick picture of the conflict and its cause:

Bolivia is a rich and varied country, with landscapes ranging from dense jungle and lowlands, to the Altiplano, the highest stretch of the Andes mountains where foolishly someone at some point decided to place La Paz, Potosi, the Salt Flats, and a number of other interesting and cool sites despite the fact that the region is located roughly between 11,000 and 20,000 feet. They were apparently unaware that the air is thinner up there, and no one has any business being at that altitude unless they are in fact sitting in an airplane seat.

The country is also quite varied culturally, consisting in the two largest distinctions of the descendants of Europeans (and mestizos), and the indigenous populations. In Bolivia, this indigenous population is the largest in South America, making up roughly 60% of the population. However, as is the story in most of Latin America, they haven’t exactly been given what anyone would consider a fair share of either the political power or the wealth. As a result, Bolivia has a fairly well-established routine of campesino (indigenous farmers, mostly poor) protests. These protests usually take the form of road-blocks and giant demonstrations, the goal of which is to annoy rich gringos trying to take photos of their country to bore people at home with. They also effectively shut down the country, which makes the politicians somewhat obligated to pay at least the bare minimum of attention to their demands.

As we were trying to get to La Paz, as Tyler has already related in a previous post, the most recent situation was just beginning to seriously heat up. The conflict was in large part over the oil industry in Bolivia, and specifically about the fact that large foreign multinationals are taking most of said oil out of the country and making a fortune, while the people of Bolivia remain poor and undercompensated for their great natural wealth. I know, the more cynical of our readership will be saying, “What else is new?”, as Latin America has been successively raped by just about every major world power, making those powers incredibly wealthy while leaving most of the continent in horrendous poverty. However, in this instance the campesino population decided that they had had enough of that sort of nonsense, and were protesting the exportation of what they consider to be their rightful wealth. In addition, the protests were also about the under-representation of the huge campesino population, but then again they’ve been pissed about that for quite some time.

So, into the middle of this giant firestorm, Ty and I casually strolled. Perhaps we thought it would be interesting to see firsthand, perhaps we were just stupid, but whatever the reason, we suddenly found ourselves in a La Paz that was increasingly troubled, and increasingly dangerous. At first, we weren’t in any danger, the protests being quite large but largely peaceful. We explored La Paz, avoiding any trouble spots (although on one occasion we caught a dose of tear gas as a mischevious swirl of wind decided to take the eye-burning, nose-running cloud and whisk it away from the protest a few blocks over and use it to hunt gringos), and enjoyed the city for a few days.

The situation continued to get worse, however. The protesters began setting off dynamite in the streets, and we heard vague rumors of attacks on men in suits (luckily we had both forgotten to pack ours). We soon learned that the blockades were spreading, the whole country was shutting down, and that we couldn’t leave the city by any road. Our freedom to move didn’t seem quite so important until is was denied us, and suddenly we found ourselves questioning whether or not waiting the situation out was a good idea. From our vantage point within, we had no idea when the problems might end, or whether they might get substantially worse. The words “civil war” were on many lips, and while the impish nature of your travelling narrators were on some levels intrigued by the prospect of being in the middle of a war, their common sense prevailed and led them to the decision that getting out of the country was probably a better course.

We learned from the owner of the hostel at which we were staying that a taxi was being arranged to take some gringos past the blockades to the border with Peru, a small car being able to get by where buses and other transport couldn’t. The price quoted to us was $20 US, which we felt was exorbitant, and which expenditure we debated between ourselves excessively. Finally, we decided that while it felt a bit extreme, it was in reality a fairly small price to pay to avoid being delayed in our travels much longer. So, along with two other gringos who were staying at the hostel and whose acquaintance we met only as the taxi pulled up to take us away, we signed up for what would be the most intense and frightening journey either of us had yet undertaken.

The other two with whom we would share this adventure introduced themselves as Simon, a 35-year-old Australian, and Monique, mid-twenties and from Holland. Simon worked in business for a number of years before giving that up to become a guide for trekking and rafting, which he’s done for a number of years now. Monique was working in rehabilitation for troubled youth in Holland. They were friendly and talkative, and good people to share the coming ordeal with.

Our taxi drove through the city to another location, where it joined a large convoy of 7 others, all full of gringos, all run by the same company whose idea was to ferry a big shipment of gringos in one big run to the border, making a fortune off the $20 a head they were charging. In a good chunk of the other taxis was a group of seventeen 18 and 19 year old English kids, on an organized trip during their Gap year between high school and college. We’d met them all before, at the llama sacrifice in Potosi, and we were quite happy that we’d be making the quick 67 mile jaunt over to the border with them.

The convoy of taxis (all of which were mid-90s Totota Carolla sedans) thus loaded with their all-white cargo pulled out in a long line. The drivers were all friends and coworkers, and chattering constantly on their radios with each other passed and vied with each other in a constant, high-spirited game. The route they chose wound around the back side of the city, avoiding the major roads out of town. After we had climbed to the rim of the canyon in which La Paz is located, we came to the edge of El Alto, a hugely sprawling suburb of La Paz (and indeed a separate city) where the population was largely indigenous, poor, and at the moment the area of greatest protest activity. There, we encountered the first blockade, which for whatever reason allowed us to pass without much hassle. I believe a bribe was paid, but perhaps the blockaders there just weren’t all that fired up politically. The sun was just beginning to set, and maybe they were more interested in finding something alcoholic to drink, as we were to learn was a major pastime of blockaders in the nights. Either way, the ease with which we passed boded quite well for the voyage.

The convoy, eager to avoid El Alto and the main roads as much as possible, took to the back roads; dusty, bumpy tracks through the outskirts of town, mud-bricked hovels on either side seeming abandoned. They were unfamiliar with the territory, and had to backtrack often, sometimes stopping to ask directions. We wound our way through these crude streets, the dusty tan of everything and the sense of danger giving me the eerie, unwelcome fantasy that the streets were not of Bolivia, but those of Iraq. The mood of our drivers changed, becoming more nervous, less playful.

After 4 hours of this slow, torturous wending voyage (at about 12:30 at night), we left behind the city and saw the lights of El Alto begin to fall behind. Our drivers, feeling that we’d left the bulk of the problems behind, decided to return to the main road.

Big mistake.

We hit pavement, and the string of taxis which to this point had been moving painfully slowly towards our destination, stretched their legs and ran, reaching speeds of 50mph for the first time all night, bringing with it a relaxing of tension and the feeling of progress. We made jokes and talked with the others about our travels and travails, seeing the way ahead clear and easy.

The feeling didn’t last long, as up ahead we saw the first of the cars begin braking. Out of the dark field to our right I saw a man running towards the car, falling behind as we passed. The convoy stopped entirely, a blockade across the road ahead, and looking into the side mirror of the car I saw silhouetted against the lights of the city behind an incalculable number of shadows bobbing as they ran up behind the cars. They flooded around in a giant throng, dark shadows outside fogged up windows, pounding on hoods and shaking the cars on their shocks, yelling unintelligible things, angry things. Some of the shadows brandished clubs, and in an instant of horrible realization, I was certain, absolutely certain, that we were going to be dragged from the car and beaten.

Our driver rolled down his window a crack and in a voice shaky with fear told the mob that the jefe was in the first car, that they’d have to speak with him. Some of the crowd drifted off towards the front, and after a few moments to compose himself, our driver got out of the car to go join the others at the head of the train, instructing us before he left to keep the doors locked and not to leave. The thought of getting out of the car had in fact not even slightly crossed any of our minds, and was unlikely to do so as long as an angry mob waited outside.

After a number of tense minutes, during which we tersely discussed our options (limited), our driver came back and told us that the blockaders were going to let us pass in return for a small tax, or bribe as its known in most circles. I believe the sum was 5 Bolivianos per head, 20 per car, something like $3.50 each taxi. Slowly, the line of cars began to go forward, and as our car passed the blockade itself, I began to realize the enormity of the situation we were facing, as hundreds of campesinos gathered around fires in metal drums watching us pass, some shouting at us, most silently staring.

We breathed a collective sigh of relief, as the blockade faded behind, but the mood in the car had significantly changed. We understood now that the quick jaunt to the border was significantly more complicated, and significantly more dangerous. We plied the driver for information; how much longer, are there more roadblocks, are we going to make it? He responded with what to his credit were very optimistic responses assuring us that we’d get there, and soon. Something about the first portion of the night, however, made us begin to suspect that he didn’t know, and was only telling us what we wanted to hear.

The next section of the road is a bit hazy in my memory. Did we pass more roadblocks in the hours between 1 and 2? We must have, but I can’t really recall. The next event I’m sure of occurred as we pulled up to a very large blockade, located on a bridge.

We were perhaps the 6th car in line, pulling onto a bridge and stopping. Again, the dark shapes, many more this time, packed in around the cars. They peered in, seeming less angry than the previous mob, but still shouting and trying to open doors locked quickly in fear. They wanted to know who was inside, and we felt this time that showing them we were gringos was beneficial, so we wiped away the fog clouding our ability for each group to see the other, and shouted “Hola!” in an attempt to appear as friendly and non-threatening as possible. It’s harder to hurt someone who’s smiling and waving dumbly than someone hunched in fear. At least, that was the idea.

A large sub-section of the general throng was moving from the front car back along the line towards ours, peering in each, sometimes opening trunks to search for merchandise. They were primarily concerned with preventing any commerce from happening in the country, and so were looking for smugglers trying to slip goods by the blockades. They came to the car in front of us, another taxi that wasn’t part of our group but had somehow slipped into our line at some point earlier, trying to gain protection from our numbers. The previously neutral shouting became angry, as they opened the rear of the car and saw heaps of baggage, seeming too much for the few passengers inside.

We had no idea at the time why they were suddenly angry; from our vantage point the mob simply turned violent, shaking the car as some members began shouting to burn it, and everyone inside. The driver of the cab fled, running off into the night, never to return. The cab rocked dangerously on it’s shocks, and only after heated discussion and sifting of the bags in the back did they decide that it wasn’t commercial goods after all, only baggage, and the mobs anger subsided somewhat, if only from a boil to a simmer, waiting somewhat hopefully for something to give it reason to rise again.

They came to our car next, and our driver opened the trunk for them. Our bags were back there, and our fear was that they might simply grab one of the smaller ones and leave with it, but all our gear was not worth our personal safety, so we stayed inside the car and hoped that everything was still there when we got through. After they had inspected all the cars, the group moved towards the front, where the drivers of all the cars and the campesinos were discussing the situation, and trying to find a suitable resolution.

In the car, we were all tense but tried to relax, occasionally telling jokes and stories to take our mind off the situation outside. A half hour passed and more before our driver came back to the car. It was cold outside, bitter cold, and it seemed he was only warming up before heading back out to continue the debate. He didn’t tell us much, only that we would be going soon, not to worry. It began to get cold inside the car, very cold.

After another interminable period, he came back again, and again told us that we would be leaving soon, 20 minutes, no mas. He quickly belied the truth of his statement by falling asleep, snoring loudly.

Time passed, one hour, two. The time was now around 3:30, maybe 4. We tried to sleep, pulling my sleeping bag out of my large pack which had of necessity ridden on the laps of the three in the back, as the trunk had been too small to accomodate all of our gear together. It was very cold, and the three in the back huddled together under my bag while I pulled on as much clothing as I could in the passenger seat and tried to sleep.

During the night, another convoy of taxis pulled up onto the bridge. There were about 8 more of them, and they received much the same treatment as we had. I was woken by the commotion, but after the same search and questioning session, the situation calmed down again and everyone in both convoys settled down to wait.

Finally, the sun rose, slowly bringing with it a bit of warmth. The morning progressed, and the situation on the bridge became more relaxed, almost concert-like as the day became warm, and in the new feeling of safety everyone left the cars and walked around, talking to the others, some even sunbathing. We asked what we were waiting for, and were told that some important leaders of the various tribes that were conducting the blockades in the region were coming for a large meeting to decide what to do with us, and that we should just be patient.

The day passed slowly, coming up on noon and leaving it behind. There was no longer any danger it felt, and the campesinos who occasionally passed were friendly and curious. It seems that the nighttime is much more dangerous, most likely as a result of the alcohol and coca leaves that go around in large quantities as soon as the sun sets.

Finally, at about 1 in the afternoon, the leaders of the tribes arrived in the back of a pickup truck, with a huge flag on the back in the rainbow colors of the indigenous peoples of Bolivia and Peru. They made their way through the blockade as we all tried to smile and wave as politely as we could, to the rear of the cars where a large group of campesinos waited. They all gathered around into a large group, the leaders seated in a semi-circle at the front, and began their meeting. We soon discovered that meetings among the indigenous peoples of Bolivia at the least are not quick affairs, and the introductions alone can sometimes take hours.

An hour passed without anything of note coming out the meeting. Another passed as well, before finally one of the drivers came back and told us that they were going to let us through, they just had to work out the details. This took another large chunk of time, before finally all the drivers came back and told us to get in, hurry, we had to go. The blockaders moved the large boulders and rocks at the head of the bridge, and slowly, one car at a time, our now much larger convoy of something like 18 cars pulled through and continued on our voyage.

The deal that the drivers had struck to get us moving was not entirely clear, but was at least in part based on the idea that after the gringos were dropped at the border, the convoy would return by the same route and pick up the campesinos, to take them into La Paz for a large protest planned the next day. In return, we not only got to pass, but one of the leaders came with us as a guide to get us through the rest of the roadblocks. They told us there were only three more blocks, and that with his help we would get through them and to the border quickly. Everything seemed to be going great, and the way appeared clear and easy.

We soon approached another blockade, the drivers got out and went to the front, bargained, and after 15 minutes returned and we passed. The routine was now established: pull up, the drivers get out to talk to the campesinos, they either bribe them or they let us through out of goodwill, and we pass. This rythm lulled us into a sense of security, and we laughed and joked and became good friends with the others in the car.

At about 5:30, we approached yet another roadblock. This one was positioned at the far side of a small canyon formed where the builders of the road had cut straight through a small hill, leaving the sides steep and rocky. We entered the canyon and pulled up at the blockade, our car 4th from the front. We gave the blockade a quick glimpse as our driver left the car to join the others at the front before returning to our conversation, secure in the system that had been established.

Not even a minute passed before we heard loud, angry shouting and looked up to see the drivers running back towards the cars. Behind them came a large, angry mob, running towards the cars. I saw men at the front stoop, saw them pick up rocks, saw them begin to throw them at the cars. Tires squealed as the drivers tried to get the cars turned around in the box canyon as more rocks thudded into the sides of the cars. I looked up to see men on the ridgelines above, hurling larger boulders down on top of us, whamming into the roofs, breaking glass. We ducked and covered as I curled into a ball with my arms over my head, hoping I didn’t get hit.

The drivers sped away down the road, but pulled up and stopped entirely too soon it felt. We poked our heads up, and saw that they had pulled perhaps 400m down the road, just over a rise in the road which shielded us from view of the mob, and entirely too close for our comfort. We were sure the angry mob would come flooding over the hill at any second.

The drivers all walked off together and huddled in conversation, so we immediately jumped into action, assessing the damage and any injuries. Luckily, no one had been hurt seriously. As we seemed to be the oldest of the gringos in the cars, we quickly organized the frightened English kids into squads, cleaning glass out of cars and trying to patch up windows with whatever we had against the coming cold of the night which began to fall around us. The first 3 cars had received the worst damage, having all their windows and windshields broken out. We stretched and duck-taped plastic and cardboard over the windows, carefully plucked glass out of the seats, and made the cars as serviceable as possible while the drivers turned and as a group headed back to talk to the campesinos (which took tremendous courage, I thought).

After the cars were as repared as we could make them, we waited in the dark for the drivers to return. For lack of anything to occupy ourselves, we organized a driver for each of the cars in case we had to flee, and made sure that everyone was prepared for that possibility. Then, we waited.

Time passed, how much I’m not sure, before our drivers came back and told us to get in, we were going, now. We weren’t sure if that meant away from the block or through it, but we piled back in. The cars turned around and began to head back to the blockade, as we questioned our driver as to what was happening. He said they’d let us through and assured us we’d have no problems, but I thought I detected a bit of uncertainty in his voice which magnified my own unease.

We approached the blockade slowly, and the angry mob had thinned substantially, but there were still large numbers of men standing around fires, watching us. Everyone was tense, not sure if they would attack again or honor their word, as we crept by through a winding path through the boulders and dirt of the blockade. I was tense all over, and didn’t relax until we’d left the blockade well behind. All the cars made it through, and we continued.

The rest of the night passed in a nightmare of blockades and angry campesinos, detours over bumpy roads, and a seemingly never-ending journey. We had slept little, perhaps an hour in the last 30, and I couldn’t keep my eyes open. The line between reality and dream became blurred, and I slipped in and out of conciousness despite my best efforts to remain awake. Nigthmares of being attacked blended seamlessly into our real difficulties, and I wanted only to get to the border, to end the journey.

Finally, at around 3 in the morning, we saw lights ahead and the driver told us excitedly that it was the border. We’d travelled a little more than 67 miles from La Paz to the border with Peru at Desaquaderro. The journey took 35 hours in total. I’ve never experienced anything like it.

After a few days hanging out in La Paz, which while no one would ever say is the coolest city in the world (except perhaps someone who has only been to La Paz and Pocatello, Idaho) is a pleasant place to spend a couple of days, we decided to actually do something. We’d grown tired of watching the giant protests, getting tear-gassed in passing, and ducking and crapping ourselves every time the protesters let off another stick of dynamite (not to blow anything up, but rather to simply make a loud noise to announce their presence to everyone whose head wasn’t lodged firmly up their own ass.) So, seeing as Tyler hates bikes and I hate Tyler, I convinced him to go on one of the most popular excursions from La Paz: mountain biking down The World’s Most Dangerous Road.Now, the title The World’s Most Dangerous Road might put off the average tourist with a vague interest in riding a bike down something without asphalt, but not Tyler nor I. One would guess that by advertising in every travel agency and hostel in town a trip down The World’s Most Dangerous Road that they are making sure to point out the road’s standing as the Most Dangerous in an attempt to warn people away from trying to ride a bike down it. Not to be deterred by this obvious attempt to dissuade us from attempting such a foolhardy stunt, we signed up with one of the dozens of tour companies who risk life and limb of the hundreds of tourists who refuse to heed the road’s ultimate dangerosity and park their often ample behinds squarely on a bike seat, risking death and “saddle-ass” just to get the T-Shirt that lets everyone they meet know that they, at least, have no fear of that most Peligroso of roads.

So, rising early, we were picked up in our hostel by a van already packed full of another tour group of Israelis doing the same thing as us that day. The ride to the start of The World’s Most Dangerous Road takes an hour or so, and passes out of La Paz and up to the top of a giant pass in the Andes dividing the Altiplano (high plains) of the west and the Yungas (or jungly-type area) of the east. 2/3 of our group consisted of the coolest people of all time, as somehow we’d lucked out and were going with only Tyler, myself, and our guide. (The Israelis were with another company, and as such we didn’t have to go in a group with them). The first part of The World’s Most Dangerous Road (or TWMDR as I shall refer to it from here on out) consists of about 20k of asphalt road, descending from freezing cold Altiplano pass regions down to where the road becomes dirt, and the climate much warmer and humid, and the land becomes green with vegetation. At this point, we stopped at a small roadside stand to fuel our bodies for the coming descent of TWMDR.

After stocking up on fried-egg sandwiches, we continued on for another hour or so before we came to where TWMDR actually starts, announcing its awesome presence by turning off from the main road and going in a completely different direction. The road gets its name not just as a cheap advertising gimmick, but from the fact that it is indeed a dangerous road. The road itself is dangerous because the Bolivian engineers who created it made it very narrow, and foolishly carved it into the side of a mountain with a sheer cliff on one side! Anyone who wishes to make a road not the Most Dangerous in the World should place “avoid giant cliff proximity” high in their list of tasks when building said road. The road gains a bit on the dangerous meter as well by the fact that it is used mostly by tons of giant trucks, peppered about a bit with buses full of potential bus-plunge victims, and of course tourists cruising down on mountain bikes, barely competent enough to work the brakes on the bike. A lot of the drivers chew coca leaves continuously to stay awake, which accounts for the steering-wheel-clenching, green-toothed, and wild-eyed appearance of most of them. Accidents do happen on the road with frequency, as it’s the type of road where owing to its inability to allow two cars to use the same stretch of road along 99% of it, when two vehicles encounter one another going opposite directions, assuming they don’t actually collide, one of them has to back up for quite some distance to find a suitable passing spot.

So, hopping awesomely onto our bikes, we began to tackle the challenging descent of TWMDR. Unfortunately, our guide didn’t really know how to ride a bike all that well, so our group speed wasn’t all that high, and even Tyler managed to impress him with his daring speeds. We stopped for a brief lunch at a wide spot in the road, known for the fact that an Israeli girl had used the cliff immediatey to the left as a good place to get herself sadly killed by riding off said cliff a couple of years before. What a great place to stop and enjoy a tasty snack. (In the picture below, you can barely make out Tyler, standing on the road in the bottom part of the picture, which gives some amount of scale. It should be noted that the cliff would still look really big if it were a normal-sized person standing there as well.)

So, after lunch we again set out, Tyler and I again trying to push our speeds up into the realm of at least pulse-beating, if not actually pulse-pounding. Finally, our guide, scared to death of the speeds we wanted to go, bailed out and switched with another guide (the advance scout from the Israeli group who was an avid mountain biker). This new guy, pleased to be freed from his duties with the other group and given free license to go as fast as he wanted with the crazy gringos, promptly took off at high speed, leaving behind a trail of dust with flecks of fire in it. We never saw him again. So now, Tyler and I were free to go as fast as we wanted, and promptly did. The rule with mountain biking is: if you’re not at least 10-15% out of control and scared, you could be having a ton more fun. So, we flew down TWMDR as fast as we were able, and then a bit faster, having a great time trying to kill ourselves. The rest of the ride took a few hours, down some really beautiful landscape.

At the end of the ride, we arrived in a small town in the jungle. Our group and the Israeli one as well were taken to a very nice resort, where they served us an all-you-can-eat buffet next to a nice pool that I still wouldn’t have swam in had you paid me. Big mistake for them, as Tyler and I ate 4-5 helpings of just about everything, forgoing other activities such as sitting in the sun by the pool to gorge ourselves more. Good food, too. The grounds had, in its repertoire, two ornry parrots who hated your guts whether they knew you or not, and snapped their beaks at anyone who came close. At one point one of the birds cornered me with my back to a fall of a few meters, and I was forced to fight my way out.

I lost, horribly.

So anyway, the day ended, and we road the van back up and over TWMDR to La Paz. It was on this particular ride that I discovered that Israelis love to sing, and as such we spent the entire 4 hour ride belting out such classics as Hotel California, and Hit Me Baby One More Time. Good times.

In closing, I’ll leave you with a picture of awesomeness:

(who’s that guy?)