The Great Adventure: Part I Preparations

In a week I will depart on perhaps the greatest adventure of my time in the Amazon Rainforest. A crew of six is gearing up for a two-week dugout canoe trip deep into the jungle and back. Two Ndjuka friends of ours will bring us and three dugout canoes to an Amerindian village called Apetina. From there we will canoe over sixty-five miles without a guide through almost entirely uninhabited jungle and deadly rapids back home to Diitabiki. We will bring very little food with us, for piranha and peacock bass will be our fare. Tents are unnecessary; we will build frames covered by tarps for our hammocks every night, clearing our own campsites from the forest. Our Ndjuka friends believe us to be insane, which may be true, but our thirst for adventure knows no bounds.

Charles Shriley, an American IMB missionary who lives across the river from Diitabiki has organized the event. Two short-term missionaries in Charles’ organization, Ryan Rindels, who rode with me in the Endurance, and Taylor Ivester, who rode with Charles will come as well. Ted Jantz, a media professional who grew up among the Amerindians in the south, and his son Raphael, who also was raised in Suriname, completes our team of six Americans. All of us have experience living in the bush and are proficient in the local language. Where we are going, however, we are unlikely to see many people.

Charles and Taylor have improved their canoe by adding backrests for their seats and racks for fishing rods and coolah sticks, which are used for poling through rapids. They will be laughed at, and the rest of us will hide the inevitable soreness of our backs on the second week of the trip. The Endurance, however, is not to be outdone. She will be cleaned, sanded, and re-varnished, and her slow leak in the bow will be stopped.

To prepare for the challenges of the trip, I have been taking the Endurance to the swift waters downriver and teaching myself to pole down…and up rapids, standing up of course. As you can imagine, standing in dugout canoe is like balancing on a floating log. The rapids steadily are being conquered, but it is good to practice far away, so stories of spectacular tumbles will be limited. When I referred to the excursion as a “camping trip,” Charles admonished me, “this is no camping trip; this is an adventure.”