16th Annual International Amazon River Raft Race

At the finish line! Result: not last!

Iquitos is, like all civilization imposed on the Amazon jungle, carved out of the trees on ground just high enough to staunch the water all around. Big and small waterways squiggle through the land and many areas you might consider dry ground are under 10 feet of water for half the year. Our team of 4 Americans who live in Lima arrived late on a Wednesday morning: Ben, Jeremy, Mike and myself. The other 3 are all home brewers and when their original 4th teammate dropped out, they allowed me to join, probably vetting me solely on my love of beer. The challenge in front of us was the 16th Amazon River International Raft Race, in which we were to build our raft and paddle it 118 miles in what Guinness records as the longest raft race in the world.

10 seconds in Iquitos. Note frame 2, woman on scooter with phone. Final frames show a typical wood-topped bus.

Preparations

Casa de Fierro (Iron House)

Since Iquitos is reachable only by boat or plane, there are not a lot of cars on the road. Instead one is set in a swirling flow of motocarros (motorcycle rickshaws) and scooters, buzzing like a swarm of bees. Toddlers ride nonchalantly balanced between their parents' legs and cargo is strapped on however possible. We checked into our hotel near the center of town, where the staff had hung a little banner on our door welcoming us by our team name "3 Hour Tour". It was time for lunch, so we crossed the central plaza to the Malecon where we sat outside overlooking a large inlet, where we dined on rather badly prepared paiche (an Amazon fish that is often as big and heavy as myself) and palm-heart salad. Central Iquitos is made up of drooping buildings from the rubber boom era 100 years ago, with ornate filial work and vestiges of elegance, stately ladies who are now worse for the wear and their mascara is running. Sitting on the square is an anomaly, a house of iron plate and rivets designed by Eiffel (yes, that Eiffel) for a world fair in Europe. A rubber baron purchased it and had it walked piece by piece through the jungle to end up here.

Our task for the day was finding all the extra materials we knew we would want for our raft: plastic chairs to affix, foam padding, wire, etc. To this end, we went to the local street marked where we navigated narrow passageways where one can find cheap Chinese goods, ceremonial herb liquors and hallucinogens, piles of trash with vultures picking through it, dried monkey heads, and hardware to build a raft. We stumbled upon a little cigar-making area where heaps of tacky fresh tobacco was hand-shredded in a wood cutter and hand-rolled by a couple of boys who probably should have been in school. The process of tracking down the various items on our list took all afternoon and dragged us around the neighborhood. We prevailed, however, and evening found us on the Malecon for the welcome reception. The teams were given pisco sours to toast with, there was a display of local dancing, and a shaman did a blessing. The plight of the Amazon River dolphins was highlighted by a guy in a dolphin costume, though we weren't sure whether his waving flippers were saying "hello" or "help, I can't move my feet and I am suffering heat stroke". The other guys on my team are ex-Peace Corps, and three of the other teams were made up of current PC volunteers, and when you include several other rafters, almost 25% of the 88 participants were connected to Peace Corps. Otherwise there was another team like us, connected to the embassy in Lima, a couple of Lima teams connected to schools, a couple of business teams, a couple of generally international teams, and 5 or 6 teams indigenous to the region. These locals are far and away the favorites, they build the best rafts, they are light and strong, and they know the river. Officially, our team raced in the "International Men" category, only able to watch in awe as the locals zip away. Even the Peruvian citizens from Lima should probably have been in the "International" category, the local advantage is so pronounced. Anyway, we ditched out of the opening ceremony in favor of a excruciatingly slow pizza dinner and an early bedtime.

Clockwise from top left: Ben, me, Mike, Jeremy

The Build

Foreshadowing the general state of communications and record-keeping, the organizers failed to mention to us (and a couple other teams) that we were all to meet up at 6:30am. One of the PC Volunteers contacted Jennifer (who was at a conference in Panama) and she contacted me and we all rushed out of the hotel to make it there by 8am. But of course, none of the organizers seemed particularly perturbed by our tardiness, leaving the PC Volunteers wondering why the heck they had been there on time. We tagged our gear and loaded up a bus, heading a couple hours up to the little town of Nauta, which is also the terminus of the road. Nauta is just above the confluence of two large rivers that combine to create the behemoth of the Amazon River. The town had erected a little stage and welcomed us with a dance by local kids that depicted the god/demon of the Amazon River abducting a girl, possible copulating with her prior to her rescue. You know, family-friendly content. The mayor gave a very polished speech ("We welcome you as friends of the Amazon, not conquerors…"), and we met a representative of the Save The Amazon Dolphin group who looked like he would be more comfortable at a Starbucks in Lima. We were introduced also to the Don Jose, our support barge and, apparently, dance music sound system.

The Don Jose, support boat, banquet hall, toilet.

The Don Jose is 3 stories of rusting plate, with post-apocalyptic restrooms and flickering florescent lighting. Hammocks were slung on the top deck, the middle deck was the kitchen, and the bottom deck carried our gear. We were all ferried across the river to the beach where we were to have lunch and build our rafts. We were well supported in all things physical, there were people to feed us, set and break camp, etc., but there were no river maps, no nightly team-captain meetings, no safety lectures. The food served to us over the next 4 days was very good, inelegantly served in styrofoam; local cuisine such as juanes (a green rice and chicken dumpling prepped in jungle leaves), grizzly pork chops, heartening oatmeal, and a popsicle with every lunch. There were several different refrescos (fruit punch), some new to me (e.g. cebada, a sweet barley punch, or some jungle fruit I had never heard of).

Juanes (rice dumpling), plantains, palm
salad, and a popsicle

The pregnant lady we
needed to do the nailing.

The beach was lined with our tents for the night, and the sand was alive with locals offering to help build the rafts. Each team was given 8 logs, a long 4x4, a saw, a machete, a length of questionable rope, and 7in nails. We brought our own baling wire, plastic chairs, foam. With the benefit of hindsight, I could build a much better raft now. The guy with the chainsaw? Hire him, and get him early, to cut the ends of your logs to points. We could have paid premium prices and hired an expert who would have planed our logs so they fit together air-tight and straight. But what did we know? We hired a pair of assistants who were very handy, but did not have any particular raft-building skills, and we just got to it. It was a long, hot, sweaty day…with humbling moments like when none of us seemed to be able to drive a 7in nail without bending them, and the pregnant lady helping took over in a huff. We sealed the bottom with industrial strength sealer paint, a sticky unpleasant task and not so great for those river dolphins we were supposed to be protecting. A few of the indigenous teams eschewed the help of the chainsaw men, opting instead to whittle their points by machete alone, working into the darkness planing the edges of their logs so they were perfectly straight. Later, we would see these rafts in action and it was like comparing Formula 1 cars to wheelbarrows. But we wired the logs together, we drove our crooked nails, sawed off the legs of our plastic chairs, and affixed a couple gear buckets. Then we christened her The Minnow. We sat in her chairs and enjoyed our dinner and a beer, no less proud of our creation than Dr. Frankenstein.

The night was miserable. Music from the Don Jose went a little too late. The 4 of us large gringos all squeezed into our one small tent, removing the fly to ease the heat, and attempted to sleep without touching one another. I am not sure how others feel, but 4 guys like us can't really sleep comfortably while touching, so I looked over at one point at Mike next to me, comically in the same position as I, arms crossed stiffly on our chests like Egyptian mummies. Then the rain came so we had to jump out and reset the fly. Then we noticed the tent was simply full of mosquitos; we slapped at them by flashlight, streaking the tent with so many smears of blood that it could have been a scene out of a horror movie. Somehow, Jeremy slept through it all. Needless to say, we were not particularly perky for the start of the race the next morning.

Starting line, day 1.

Paddling, Day 1

With daylight came the moment of truth: we put The Minnow in the water and got on. Under our weight, her back end was almost completely under water. But the horn blew, the local teams shot forward out of sight, and the rest of us started the long paddle back to Iquitos, 118 miles downstream. Over the next 3 days, we would paddle The Minnow for 22 hours. Those days blur together in my memory, the sound of paddles slapping the water, 4 guys telling anecdotes or debating the vagaries of the currents, large puffy clouds steaming up from the jungle canopy, the occasional freight barge rumbling past with shirtless pot-bellied men waving to us, now and then a family in a long flat dugout with the ladies up front under umbrellas and a man in back at the long outboard motor. The first couple of days we jockeyed back and forth with other rafts, but were rarely in hailing distance. These days were much more isolated than I expected…long hours, just us pushing along on our sagging logs out in the middle of a river so wide and slow that you might mistake it for a lake. Every now and then, locals in front of thatched houses on stilts would wave to us.The little support boat passed, at best, once during a day as did the Don Jose, passing us on it's way to set up the next campsite. We caught glimpses fresh water dolphin; sleek little silvers or the chunkier pinks. Once in a long while a beautiful butterfly would flutter past, but then it would just be us and the brown water again, moving almost imperceptibly along a repeating backdrop of the jungle at the river's edge, telling R-rated stories to stave off fatigue. So we were caught off guard when a sweet, swift shore current sped us along and surprised us with the Don Jose at the end of stage 1, with 3 or 4 rafts coming in behind us.

Sunrise on the Amazon, Nueva Esperanza

Nueva Esperanza (New Hope) was a pretty little grassy clearing next to a small thatch school. We hung our soggy stuff up to dry and relaxed with some lunch and beer sold from a local lady's cooler, looking out over the river and chatting with other teams. The four of us share the trait, I think, of being over-preparers. I had outfitted myself with a vented sun-hat, long-sleeved swimshirt, gloves, SPF pants and scuba socks. But I was a grateful for my dorkiness when I looked at some of the other participants: sun-scorched, bug-bit, and blistered. The current Peace Corps volunteers are the kind of people who adventure by the seat of their pants, without a lot of planning, durable and impulsive. But they were not too proud to accept cortisone, aloe, beer. We made some adjustments to The Minnow that helped slightly with her buoyancy, but even so we started using her new name: Sea Anchor. Anyway, night fell and two things made the night better. One is that instead of playing loud music, the organizers used their electronics to show a movie, Rio 2, to the local kids eagerly clustered on the grass. The other is that we got a second tent. So after appreciating the milky way and the Southern Cross, I went off to a much better night's sleep.

Paddling, Day 2

The typical view: big river, big sky.

Dancers in Tamshiyacu

Our second day on the river was much like the first, only longer, 9 hours, marked by a couple of gigantic turns in the river. Unlike the day prior, we were not shielded from the sun by a cloud layer, though a squall did dump some rain on us during a grueling crossing. We also fell towards the back of the pack, but we avoided a navigational error by several other teams and again finished with 3-4 rafts behind us.

This night was spent in the relatively large town of Tamshiyacu (pop. 8,000). The town had put the school at our disposal, and we slept on the concrete floors of a 2nd floor room along with 4 other teams. Except for Mike, who wisely snapped up one of the last available rooms at a hostel and enjoyed tv and a fan while the rest of us bucket bathed at the school. The town seemed to enjoy the carnival of 90 outsiders showing up; street vendors sold flip flops and clothing, a girl in a mini skirt down a dark street advertised the local brothel, and kids kicked around a soccer ball among piglets wandering loose. Much of the town showed up at the school courtyard and sat in bleachers for show put on a dance show by about 10 different school groups. I am unclear on whether it was for our benefit or not. The kids were all variously costumed, some dramatically so, and the dances described local practices. Like our welcoming dance in Nauta, the kids did not shy away from risque content. The banana tree girls were "pruned" by the boys with machetes, stripping down to shorts and halters. The fish goddess "rolled" with a man and, after some dancing by some seriously cool fish costumes, yielded a fertility of fish. Sadly, most of us rafter were so exhausted that we went to sleep after the first few dances. I recall worrying that the noise would keep me awake, but before I could complete the thought I was sound asleep. Until, that is, a big-daddy of a thunderstorm rolled through, shaking the school and thundering on the roof.

Paddling, Day 3

Rechristened as The Sea Anchor, on the final 400 yards.

This last day was different in that the organizers delayed the start of the local teams by an hour, so we could all arrive in Iquitos more closely. This meant that we got the privilege of seeing those teams pass us on the river, their rafts sleekly zipping forward with each coordinated paddle stroke. This was also our most plodding day. We immediately took a shortcut, a lesser channel but more direct, but the current was minimal. Eventually we figured out that there was little to debate, the river was just slow. We immediately fell behind all the other rafts, Sea Anchor being waterlogged and us at times disheartened. But we paddled doggedly on, driving Sea Anchor's nose into the water with every stroke. The final stretch approaching Iquitos gets very wide and is a deceptively long crossing. Basically, even though it seemed as if we could see where we were going, it took several hours and optical illusions played havoc with our perceptions. At the beginning of the crossing, we got our one visit from the support boat of the whole race. They asked us if we wanted a tow because "It is very far!", but we refused indignantly. The upside of their visit is that our route became clear and this allowed us to gain seriously on a couple of other teams who followed the wrong side of the river, eventually meaning that we finished the day 2nd to last, much better than we expected. We passed the derelict rubber industry area of Iquitos, passing the city towards the finish. The final indignity was that the last 400 yards were paddling desperately upstream against the current of a side river. But we pushed our way past the water taxis and seaplanes moored there and pulled into the finish as a crowd generously cheered us on and gave us fresh coconut water.

At this point, I still do not know where in the rankings we finished. Certainly near the bottom, but I am curious what teams, if any, we might have beaten overall. The experienced overall winners, light and tight, did the course in just 14 hours. One thing is certain though, we can be very proud of what we did, it's just takes some explaining. No one else had a semi-submerged raft like us, no one else had our combined weight, yet we doggedly drove the Sea Anchor 118 miles in 22 hours. And we did it in good fellowship, laughing at each other most of the way, unlike many of the other teams. That being said, we walked away from The Sea Anchor ne Minnow without hardly a backward glance.

A large 2-story concrete structure without walls, the Iquitos "Yacht" Club was full of racers and locals in a celebratory mood. The bottom floor featured two girls dancing for the family crowd in what can only be called stripper outfits, but we were upstairs where a lunch awaited us. Still in our soggy river gear, we joined other teams to eat and cool off with beer. The awards ceremony was a mess. The organizers had several teams misclassified and had not recorded some of the time penalties (e.g. for switching in substitute paddlers). Most of it got worked out by teams running up to the podium, or refusing an undeserved award. There was a strange scene as we were departing in which one team tried to give their medals and cash prize to the true winners, the Peace Corps mixed-gender team, and one of the volunteers weirdly refused the gesture. Anyway, we eventually found moto-taxis to get us back to our hotel, racing other teams through the buses and motorcycles of the teeming streets.

The showers at the hotel was like a miracle, and when we gathered in the evening at the local expat bar, we were refreshed, hungry and thirsty. Several of the Peace Corps volunteers were there too, so we shared beer and burritos and river stories. We did not last long though, as with most of the nights of this experience, we went to bed early to an exhausted, deep sleep. Our morning flight brought us back to the chill of Lima and, for me, a growing sense of satisfaction with what we did. It's probably just because I'm starting to forget what it really meant, 22 hours paddling with a soggy butt, down 118 miles of the Amazon.