Running the Amazon Read online

  Joe Kane’s

  RUNNING THE AMAZON

  “For all of the river’s 4,200 exotic miles, Running the Amazon is a crisp book, the offering of a narrator who followed his instincts to a fabulously rich strike and then spent the proceeds wisely.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  “A good adventurer is rarer than a good adventure; an easygoing book about fear and bravado is a very rare thing indeed.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “The reader will feel the bruises and the exhilaration as they battle the river, Indians, guerrillas, drug dealers and each other … It’s a wonderful adventure story.”

  —Dallas Morning News

  “An extraordinary adventure … Borne along by well-crafted, muscular prose, we survive close calls with rapids and revolutionaries, encounter strange species (human and otherwise), endure the heat and insects and white water—all without leaving the comfort of the den.”

  —New York Newsday

  “Kane’s eloquence lends his story a you-are-there quality.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  FIRST VINTAGE DEPARTURES EDITION, MAY 1990

  Copyright © 1989 by Joe Kane

  Photographs Copyright © 1989 by Zbigniew Bzdak/Canoandes, Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published, in hardcover, by Alfred A. Knopf Inc., in 1989.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Kane, Joe.

  Running the Amazon / by Joe Kane.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80990-2

  1. Amazon River—Description and travel. 2. Kane, Joe—Journeys—

  Amazon River. I. Title.

  [F2546.K19 1990] 89-40610

  981.1—dc20

  v3.1

  for Elyse

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Illustrations

  Acknowledgments

  Map of the Amazon River

  ONE • HIGH COUNTRY 1. The Pacific

  2. The Colca

  3. Headwaters

  4. The Upper Apurimac

  5. The Black Canyon

  6. Trail’s End

  TWO • WHITE WATER 7. Meeting the Great Speaker

  8. The Acobamba Abyss

  9. The Middle Apurimac

  10. The Lower Apurimac (The Red Zone)

  11. The Ene

  12. The Tambo

  THREE • THE RIVER SEA 13. The Upper Ucayali

  14. The Lower Ucayali

  15. The Marañón

  16. The Solimões

  17. The Amazon

  18. The Pará

  19. The Atlantic

  Afterword to the Vintage Edition

  About the Author

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  Following this page:

  6.1 “El Condorito.”

  6.2 At, 15,000 feet on the approach to the source: François Odendaal, Tim Biggs, Pastor.

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

  6.4 Zbyszek Bzdak at the source of the Amazon.

  6.5 Dr. Kate Durrant and the author in San Juan.

  6.6 Portaging the upper Apurimac: Piotr Chmielinski, Tim Biggs, François Odendaal, Jerome Truran.

  6.7 The last Inca hanging bridge, woven entirely of hammered grass.

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

  6.9 Piotr Chmielinski, Jerome Truran, Tim Biggs.

  6.10 Tim Biggs on the upper Apurimac.

  6.11 Quechua man and son.

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

  6.13 Jerome Truran in the Acobamba Abyss.

  6.14 Lining the raft through the Acobamba Abyss.

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

  6.16 Jerome Truran in the Acobamba Abyss.

  6.17 Tim Biggs executing an Eskimo roll.

  6.18 Cloud Forest in the Red Zone: Jerome Truran, Tim Biggs, François Odendaal.

  6.19 Piotr Chmielinski, Jerome Truran, Peruvian marine in the Red Zone.

  6.20 In the Red Zone: Jerome Truran, the author, Kate Durrant.

  6.21Asháninka man.

  6.22 On the lower Tambo: Kate Durrant and Jerome Truran on native raft; Piotr Chmielinski and the author on gringo equivalent.

  6.23 Piotr Chmielinski, Kate Durrant, and the author with sea kayaks and the Jhuliana in Pucallpa.

  Following this page:

  12.24 Sea kayak with Christmas tree, Iquitos.

  12.25 On the River Sea: Piotr Chmielinski and the author near the Brazilian border, two thousand miles from the Atlantic.

  12.26 Friends in Tabatinga.

  12.27 Piotr Chmielinski and caboclo fisherman with the author’s birthday dinner.

  12.28 In storm’s wake on the Solimões.

  12.29 Piotr Chmielinski (foreground) and the author. Sea kayak with bushmaster.

  12.30 The author and Piotr Chmielinski in sea kayaks; Kate Durrant aboard the Roberto II.

  12.31 Downtown Gurupá.

  12.32 The author, Piotr Chmielinski, and caboclo fishermen near Marajó Bay.

  12.33 Oz: the author and Piotr Chmielinski at the mouth of the Amazon.

  12.34 All photographs by Zbigniew Bzdak/Canoandes, Inc.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The experiences on which this book is based reflect a shared effort by the members of the Amazon Source to Sea Expedition: Tim Biggs, Zbyszek Bzdak, Piotr Chmielinski, Kate Durrant, Jack Jourgensen, Sergio Leon, François Odendaal, Jerome Truran, Fanie Van der Merwe, and Pierre Van Heerden. That they would commit themselves not only to running the Amazon but to being observed and written about by me, a stranger to all of them when I arrived in Peru, bespeaks a profound collective courage, one from which I continue to draw inspiration.

  Without the encouragement, guidance, hard work, and friendship of my agent, Joe Spieler, I would have had neither the wherewithal to embark on such a journey nor the confidence to write about it; to him I extend my deepest thanks. My editor, Ashbel Green, patiently guided me out of the disaster area that is a first draft into the Promised Land of a finished book; without him this story would not have been told. Of the many people who also read and commented on the manuscript, I wish especially to thank K. Patrick Conner and Daniel Ben-Horin, who waded through several swampy drafts with keen eyes and unflagging pencils. I am eternally in their debt.

  The expedition itself would not have succeeded without the off-the-water support—financial, logistical, and emotional—of Bryce Anderson, Patricia Moore, Jim Allison, Jacek and Teresa Bogucki, Kaye Reed and the people of Casper, Wyoming, Canoandes, Inc. and Michael and Selma Kon, Jerzy Majcherczyk, and Andrzej Pietowski of Canoandes Expeditions, Jerzy Dylski and Polonia of New York, Boleslaw Wierzbianski of Nowy Dziennik, New York, John Tichenor, Wilbur E. Garrett and National Geographic Magazine, Mark Bryant and Outside Magazine, and the South American Explorers Club. A special thanks also to Marc Reisner, Jim Keller, Randall Hayes and the Rainforest Action Network, and Manuel Lizarralde.

  We were provided with excellent equipment and supplies by Bill Masters of Perception and Aquaterra kayaks, whose vessels we came to know perhaps too intimately; by Sally McCoy and The North Face, whose tents we called home for six months; by Jeanette Smith of Yurika, our main food supplier; and by Jim Stohlquist of Colorado Kayak Supply, who outfitted us with white-water gear.

  Of the hundreds of people in South
America who helped us along the way, I wish in particular to thank: Luis E. Muga in Lima; Antonio Vellutino and family, the Arana family, Jose Domingo Paz and family, Mauricio de Romana and family, the Hotel Turistas, and the Pizza Nostra restaurant in Arequipa; Edwin Goycochea and Rio Bravo, and Chando Gonzalez and Mayuc Expeditions in Cuzco; Enrique “Kike” Toledo in Iquitos; Foptur, the Peruvian department of tourism; and Aero Peru.

  In Brazil, Ivano F. Cardeiro of Emamtur shielded us from the bewilderment of Manaus, and Maria Severa of Paratur and the staff of the Equatorial Palace Hotel buffered our return to the modern world in Belém. As, in Rio de Janeiro, did Mateusz Feldhuzen, of Nowy Dziennik. Thanks also to ABC-TV’s “Good Morning America” and Pan American Airlines for bringing us home.

  During my journey I saw much that I did not at first understand and could not explore as fully as I would have preferred. Many written works later helped to clarify my impressions. In particular, regarding the complex and wholly fascinating culture of the Quechua, I owe a debt to Ronald Wright’s Cut Stones and Crossroads, Billie Jean Isbell’s To Defend Ourselves, and John Hemming’s The Conquest of the Incas. On the lower Amazon, the classic studies by Alfred Rossel Wallace, Henry Bates, Richard Spruce, and William Lewis Herndon, all recorded in the nineteenth century, remain surprisingly and fully relevant.

  Finally, on the long river that is the writing of a first book I have been loved, nurtured, advised, ably critiqued, and rescued from some mighty dark spiritual holes by Elyse Axell, who along the way also consented to become my wife. This book is for her.

  ONE • HIGH COUNTRY

  1 • The Pacific

  Southern Peru, late August 1985. Beneath a rust-colored winter sky an old GMC flatbed bounced slowly through the high Andean badlands known as the puna. It is a lunar landscape, flat, treeless, ringed with bald dun hills and sharp gray peaks, bone-dry nine months of the year, beaten by frigid, dust-coated winds. At fifteen thousand feet, where the oxygen content of the air is about half that at sea level, the head throbs, and in those rare moments when the sky brightens, cold sunlight races down uncut and stings the eyeballs. I beheld the puna through an involuntary squint. And I thought, uneasily, that I did not at all understand what I was getting into.

  There were five of us hunkered down on the truck bed. We proposed to make the first source-to-sea navigation of the planet’s longest river, the Amazon, to see with our own eyes every foot of the four-thousand-mile chain of water that rises in southern Peru and spills north through the Andes and east to the Atlantic. To do that we had to find the river’s source, hidden somewhere in those bleak highlands. But in searching for the birthplace of the Amazon, we had found only dust. Though we hacked and spit and squeezed our eyelids shut, the howling puna wind drove dust into every throat, ear, eye and pore. Dust penetrated food crates, water bottles, the soul itself.

  Sitting to my right was a thirty-year-old Pole, Zbigniew Bzdak, a squat, bearish man with soft blue eyes, a flowing red beard, and a balding dome fringed with blond hair. Despite the conditions, he could no more go without talking than without air.

  “Six years ago I was living in Krakow,” he shouted to me. “I was studying photography and nuclear physics. Not a great life, but not bad. You have coffee in the morning and beer in the afternoon. One day my neighbor, this is Piotr, comes to visit. He tells me that he is going to Latin America to kayak every big river he can find.” Piotr was Piotr Chmielinski, who had recently earned a master’s degree in mechanical engineering. He and his nine-man expedition had finagled a seven-ton truck from the Polish military, stocked it with twenty kayaks and a year’s supply of kielbasa, and loaded it on a freighter. “The boat is ready to leave but the photographer has disappeared,” Bzdak said. “Piotr wants to know am I interested.”

  They left Poland together two weeks later, thinking they would be gone for six months. Neither man had yet returned.

  “First river we run is the Pescados, in Mexico. We put seven kayaks in the river. In fifteen minutes we lose six of them. River just takes them away. Big Polish joke.”

  But they persisted, ultimately running twenty-three rivers, thirteen of them first descents, in eleven countries. The Mexican government hired them to study six previously uncharted rivers. The National Geographic Society commissioned them to report on the deepest canyon in the world, Peru’s Colca. Jacques Cousteau invited them to join the white-water team for his Amazon film project (an invitation they declined in the face of other commitments).

  “Big difference between Cousteau’s Amazon expedition and this one,” Bzdak said.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “Four million dollars. Even in the Amazon Cousteau is drinking good wine. We are flat broken.”

  In 1981 the Poles made the first recorded descent of the Colca canyon. When they returned to the Colca in 1983 for National Geographic, they recruited a South African, Tim Biggs, to be their lead kayaker. Biggs was now sitting across from me with his knees pulled up beneath an Abe Lincoln beard. Thirty-three, short, muscular, dark-eyed, his curly brown hair going gray, Biggs had a reputation as a bold riverman with extraordinary energy (once, solo, he had beaten an eight-man rowing team in a twelve-hour race) and strong, sometimes perplexing convictions. He was, for example, a third-generation vegetarian from a family that raised beef cattle. For the past two hours he’d been blowing a harmonica nonstop into the teeth of the wind, playing the only tune he knew, “Waltzing Matilda,” again and again, faster and faster.

  Biggs, of British ancestry, had been a world-class distance kayaker for nearly a decade, but eventually, banned from one country after another as a South African athlete, he had retired from competitive racing. He had met the Poles in Peru in 1981, when he captained a South African expedition on the deadly Urubamba River, which flows beneath the walls of Machu Picchu. Afterward, Biggs had joined Chmielinski on a first descent of the most difficult section of the nearby Apurimac River, considered the furthest tributary of the Amazon. Later, in the city of Arequipa, he’d led the Polish team through long evenings of drinking and dancing. Bzdak had nicknamed him “Zulu.”

  Since then, however, Biggs had married, adopting his wife’s evangelical Christianity, and he now spent long evenings reading his Bible. He was ready to settle down, work the family farm, and raise kids. Still, he figured he had time for one more expedition.

  Next to Biggs sat Dr. Kate Durrant, her teeth chattering despite the sleeping bag in which she’d wrapped herself. Thirty, sharp-eyed, lean and British, she had a long, aristocratic face and auburn hair cut in a short punk style laced with orange. She stuck her head up and, as best she could, surveyed the barren puna. “At times like this,” she shouted, “I wonder why I ever came here.”

  “You come because it is better than your boring life in London,” Bzdak shouted back.

  “I suppose so.”

  She was the only woman on the expedition, which included five other men in addition to the four of us on the truck bed. Prior to her arrival in Peru she had met only two of her teammates face-to-face. She had been working in London as a general practitioner for the National Health Service when friends in the television industry mentioned a project to film the first descent of the Amazon. Thinking a female doctor would lend romance to their story, the film’s producers selected Durrant from some sixty applicants. Ultimately the producers withdrew from the project, but Durrant pushed ahead. She had spent the last year researching high-altitude and tropical medicine and assembling a medical kit designed to prevent, or nurse the team through, malaria, yellow fever, hepatitis, rabies, gangrene, intestinal parasites, toothaches, poisonous snakebites, dysentery, broken bones, and a list of other horrors up to and including the wretched candiru, a tiny, parasitic catfish that pins itself inside the human urethra with nonretractable spines. Once in place it must be cut out.

  Leaning against me for warmth, suffering in silence, was Sergio Leon. A devout Christian Scientist (only with reluctance had he agreed to ingest the twice-weekly malaria p
rophylaxis upon which Durrant insisted), he was short and dark, the strong cheekbones of his Indian ancestry mixing handsomely with a leafy black mustache bequeathed him by Spanish forebears. He had taken leave from his post as director of Costa Rica’s Corcovado National Park to participate in the expedition. He was the team’s only native Spanish speaker and its expert on tropical biology. Though as cold and uncomfortable as he ever had been, he displayed a bright-eyed tropical sangfroid. He looked twenty-five; he was forty-seven.

  I was the expedition’s only American, and, as I was to see with the painful clarity of hindsight, by far its most naive member. It was, or should have been, a telling sign that I carried in my duffel bag a copy of The Portable Conrad and wore a new great-white-hunter felt safari hat and a khaki shirt with epaulets—the sort of vogue paramilitary garb that can get one shot on sight in a violent country such as Peru.

  I was miserable, freezing, and nauseous from the altitude. I was also bewildered, what self-knowledge I possessed arising from panic rather than insight. When I’d left the United States for Peru I’d seen myself in a romantic light—as a man on the run from something, though from exactly what I hadn’t determined. On that bone-jarring truck ride, however, I vaguely, and with some horror, understood that I was also running toward something: the black hole of the Amazon. With nine complete strangers.

  For me it did not start with a wild love of the Amazon, though later I did learn to love it. It began in a more ordinary way, with a telephone call from a stranger.

  The call came on one of those bright June San Francisco days when, as they say, the weather is so perfect there does not seem to be any weather at all. The bay’s sweet-salt air drifted in through the open window of my office as I sat at my desk trying to finish a newspaper column, a sort of consumers’ service I wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle.

  The voice on the line was guttural, Germanic in tone; later I would learn it was Afrikaans. The caller identified himself as Dr. François Odendaal and said he studied butterflies for an American university. But he wanted to discuss an independent project, one that he had been developing for the last six years. He intended to become the first man to navigate the length of “the greatest of all rivers,” the Amazon.