A Note on Updates

Arriving in the city for the first time since late September, I have updated my blog with stories from the last three months. While long, these articles discuss some of the greatest adventures I have yet experienced, which of course, are best read chronologically. New pictures of Suriname and Diitabiki can be found here.

The Great Adventure: Part III The Journey Home

We set off for Diitabiki from our campsite near Apetina on December 8th, around noon. As the Endurance was the widest and sturdiest of the three dugout canoes, she took on the majority of the cargo. Loaded far heavier than the other boats and very top-heavy, steering my canoe felt like piloting the Exxon Valdez. The Endurance lived up to her name, crashing into rocks but surviving without a leak. Though after four swampings, Taylor gave her the nickname, “the submarine.”

We traveled about six miles that first day and camped on an island, facing the narrow side of the river. Raphael caught a huge Lowie, a type of catfish, and we stayed up late cleaning and cooking our catch. There was very little downtime during our journey. We would canoe until about four, set up camp, fish until dusk, build a fire, clean, cook and eat fish until about eleven, sleep, eat breakfast, tear down camp, and set out again. Survival and a steady pace made for little rest.

On the second day of our on our own we stayed on a massive island, most of which is underwater during most of the year. An ethereal landscape of sand, pools, and huge boulders separated two groves of trees that stand permanently above water. Howler monkeys filled the air with their hollow, eerie, and inexplicably resounding roar. The roar of the howler monkey can be heard up to seven miles away. It is the archetypical sound of the deep Amazon, and not at all what you would expect any primate to be capable of making. In hearing it for the first time, one can only imagine some terrible creature out on the hunt. In this setting, surrounded by water and truly impenetrable jungle with the roar of a hundred monkeys surrounding us, I felt very remote. While exploring the island as a possible campsite, we discovered an abandoned Amerindian hunting post in the smaller of the groves, with fames perfect for hanging hammocks. Raphael and I stayed on the island to fish and caught seven piranha between us. I was on cleaning duty that night and pulling out fish guts until about ten o’clock made me wish we had not caught quite so many.

That evening, Taylor saw a single, red eye of an animal in the grove where we had tied our hammocks. Ignoring thoughts of jaguars, Charles took his shotgun and, unable to see any other part of the animal, shot at its eye. It turned out to be a Hay, a small deer-like creature. How it came to live on an island, I do not know, but it was delicious with brown beans and rice.

On the river we encountered innumerable challenges. As we had no guide, we would stop to ascertain the safest passage downriver when we came to major rapids. Carving our way through the rainforest took time, and we made between five and eight miles progress each day.

At one point, Charles and Taylor, believing the upcoming rapids to be mild, told us to wait as they went ahead. Both Ryan and I assumed that if the passage was indeed easy, we were to follow in a few minutes. After a few small rapids, we saw Charles at the edge of a gigantic rapid yelling over the rushing water, “what are you doing!” As the current was too strong for us to get the Endurance to the bank, Charles told us to keep right to avoid a huge submerged stone. We, as Charles had, navigated the monster successfully, but the sheer height of the waves filled both canoes with water over the seats.

At another rapid, we slid onto a submerged rock, but the current was too strong to push the Endurance back, so I let the water twist us off the rock by turning the boat backwards, and Ryan and I turned sideways to navigate. We found ourselves whitewater rafting in an overloaded dugout canoe, going backwards. I directed the front of the canoe with my paddle, while Ryan poled from the rear, until it was safe to turn back around.

It rained every day, and all but two nights, challenging our ability to keep clothes and hammocks dry. The rainy season had officially begun while we were in the depths of the jungle. Late at night, while enjoying filets of massive peacock bass on a rocky hill, a couple of us walked down to the sand, where all three canoes had been dragged on shore. They shouted, “the boats are gone!” and we ran down to the beach just in time to see the last boat floating away, carried by the current of a nearby rapid. Heavy rains had caused the river to rise by about a foot in an incredibly short amount of time. We found all the boats but resolved to keep them tied the rest of the time.

The next day we passed Gaanboli and began to see an occasional boatman. The river was so full of rapids that we made only four miles that day. Ted and Raphael needed to fly out of Diitabiki by the 16th, and we had planned to arrive in Godolo by the day before and secure a ride for them to Diitabiki. But on the 13th, and only halfway to our destination, we found an Ndjuka boatman to take them to Pashtone, the mining camp to find another boat from there back home. We bid them farewell, and the four of us continued on our journey.

We made phenomenal time during the next two days. Based on our average of five miles a day, we estimated that it would take three days from Pashtone to Godolo. Charles, Taylor, Ryan, and I made thirteen miles the day we left Ted and Raphael. The next day, we met an incredibly long series of shallow but challenging rapids, which Ryan and I navigated expertly…up until the very last significant rapid of our adventure, when I hit a rock and swamped the boat. As I bailed and retrieved our floating cargo, Taylor celebrated the event with a rousing chorus of The Yellow Submarine. Despite the rapids and the spill, we made about twelve miles that day, passing Gololo and camping at Doo Wataa, the widest part of the Tapanahony River and on the home stretch.

The next morning we were greeted by Kate, one of my Peace Corps colleagues, traveling with a UNICEF worker and some donors to Godolo. Having been greeted in English, and in familiar territory, Charles decided that our excursion should be over rather than spending an extra night at Doo Wataa as we had planned. After lunch we took the last five miles to the Lon Wataa archipelago and Diitabiki on Wednesday, December 16th, arriving merely hours after Ted and Raphael had flown back to the city. It had taken two days to arrive at Apetina, and a full week of canoeing to return the sixty-five miles home through the unknown.

It was a relief to arrive back home in Diitabiki. We had traveled into the depths of the Amazon, and survived without guides, catching and hunting our food, and carving our way through the bush. Based on our pace during the excursion, home was still two weeks away from the first village to employ any means of transportation other than dugout canoe.

The Great Adventure: Part II Ascent to Apetina*

On December 6th, we rose at four in the morning to begin our adventure to Apetina and back again. We loaded Charles’ large motorized canoe, the Pilot, with trunks, fishing tackle, and camping equipment, and then lifted two heavy dugout canoes, side by side, upside down, on top of our luggage. Charles drove to Loabi to pick up our friends Ba Djapin and Mi Sa Libi, who had agreed to take us to Apetina, leave us there, and bring the Pilot back to Diitabiki ahead of us.

When we reached Pashtone, the mining town marking the beginning of the trail into the goldbush, we picked up the third dugout canoe, which we had previously arranged to rent for Ted and Raphael. The third canoe fit upside down on top of the others. I had never seen a dugout canoe carry three others before.

With the extremely low water level and heavily loaded boat, we often needed to swing over the sides of the Pilot to ascend the rapids. At one point, all of us, save Djapin, who was driving, needed to exert every ounce of energy simultaneously to pull the boat up the rushing water. At a monstrous, fifteen foot high, multistage, class four rapid known as Lolo Sula (Rolling Rapid), we disembarked and climbed to the top of the first stage, as the Pilot took a running start. When the boat hit the rushing water, the bow shot into the air, at least four feet above our heads when Mi Sa Libi threw a rope to the five of us. The force of the water, however, was too great for us to even hold the canoe in place. We needed to unload all three dugout canoes and practically every piece of cargo to conquer Lolo. After hauling the Pilot, the three smaller boats, and all of our equipment up Lolo, we stopped for the night, exhausted, at Gaanboli, the last Ndjuka village.

On our second day, we continued to ascend the Tapanahony. A few intense rapids slowed us down in the morning, but after we crossed the border into Amerindian territory, the water became smoother. The virgin rainforest, populated only by tiny villages many miles apart was overwhelmingly beautiful. The dry season had exposed part of the sandy riverbed and massive stones marked with lines of water up to three meters high, rose above us.

In the afternoon, fifteen minutes before Apetina we encountered an insurmountable obstacle. Another massive rapid of a nearly thirty-degree grade stood in our path. The water was only a few inches deep, and even with the boat unloaded and the help of an Amerindian, we could not pull the Pilot up the rocks. We made camp, therefore, on an island at the base of the rapids.

We fished that evening, catching a peacock bass and an anumara (an-nu-mara). The peacock bass is one of the premier sporting fishes in the world. They fight hard and seem to possess uncanny intelligence, often darting in between rocks to dislodge a lure. I am by no means a fisherman, for I did not know even how to cast before last year, but I have caught one peacock. Anumara, like peacock bass, fight hard. They like to dive to the bottom and stay still when hooked, making the angler think the lure is stuck. Anumara can grow up to forty pounds and love deep water close to the shore. The anumara that Taylor caught that second night, after being brought on shore, literally spit the lure at Taylor, lodging two treble hooks in his forearm. We ate the fish for revenge. They are not one of the better tasting Amazon fish, but we needed to catch enough fish for dinner before becoming too picky. We had to eat the fish the next day, unfortunately, because a heavy storm forced us to retreat to our hammocks before they were finished cooking. We waited for a while under our tarpaulin tents, but the rain persisted and we went to bed.

In the morning, a chief from Apetina took us to his village. Ted knew some of the villagers, and I was surprised to find that some of the Amerindians listen to me on the radio. When we returned to camp, and our Ndjuka friends had preceded us back to Diitabiki in the Pilot, we packed, loaded the three canoes and began our journey home.

*For a trailer of the documentary of our journey, see this video.