| Rafting the Amazon |
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Forget the finish line. The winning path in an Amazonian race requires savoring every last bend. 
FROM THE MOMENT I ARRIVED IN IQUITOS, Peru, it felt like a place designed to shred the best-laid plans. I had come to compete in the Great Amazon River Raft Race, the four-day, 132-mile brainchild of Mike Collis, a stout, 59-year-old Englishman and local tourism impresario from Birmingham. In Mad Mick’s Trading Post, I found Mike sitting on the balcony, sweating and smoking, keeping tabs on the street below. I had wanted the Brit’s help enlisting teammates, but in his excitement Mike spent half an hour detailing things I already knew—that all teams were required to build their own rafts out of the same materials, that it was the “longest annual raft race in the world”—before a lightbulb went off. “Hang on,” he said, scratching his belly as he took a mental inventory of the 25 four-man teams. “There was an American here earlier. Would you like to go with him?” Um, yes.I met Andrew, a teacher from Ohio who now lives in Bolivia, at the welcome party that night, and we rounded out our team with a German couple, Felix and Stephanie, who were on a yearlong trip. “We read about the race in the newspaper yesterday,” said Felix. “We said, ‘Yes, of course, why not?’” It wasn’t until we were at the start line about to board the world’s shittiest raft—which we had cobbled together the night before, in the dark, in a thunderstorm, out of eight logs and some bark—that they could answer that. Then the lifejackets and paddles we’d been promised failed to materialize. Frustrated, I vented to a fellow competitor, a dreadlocked Australian windsurfer named Rick who had an imperturbable “no worries” outlook. (The day we were stocking up, he had arrived with a smile and a branch full of bananas and declared his raft provisioned.) He would have none of my negativity. “Aw, but this is great,” he said, raising his arms toward the still-pissing sky. “We’re in the middle of the bloody Amazon!” His raft, I noticed, had only five of the required eight logs at that point. On the river, it became clear that Mike’s estimation of the race—“You’ll just be along for the ride, floating and soaking up the sun”—was optimistic at best. The Amazon was wide and lazy, and the fastest channel seemed always to be on the opposite side of the river from our raft. That the local teams were soon blips on the horizon wasn’t surprising—they were better paddlers, had crafted superior rafts, and were simply tougher than we were. But it was dispiriting to see some of the foreign teams shooting ahead too. When we got ditched by a team of American Peace Corps volunteers, who seemed to have a predilection for the local Iquiteña beer, I knew we were battling for last place. Local children began to pity us, throwing us papayas and swimming out to our raft to hang off the back and kick, in an attempt to help propel us. The first night, we nearly missed our pullout. It might have been better if we had: The village wasn’t expecting the race, so there was no food and no accommodation, and the one merchant in town ran out of beer immediately. After the next morning’s breakfast—stale bread and a soupy porridge made with river water—the tension rose to a near mutinous pitch. Even Mike, who was trailing the race in a support boat, was exasperated. He is an Ideas Man, and he seemed genuinely shocked by how badly the local officials had mismanaged his latest idea. “You know,” he confided, “I don’t think that was even the village we were meant to stop at.” By the end of the second day, Andrew had lost his pants and was wearing only boxers, a cargo boat had nearly split our raft in two, and Mike had retreated belowdecks on his support boat. But Rick, the Aussie, our frequent companion at the back of the pack, had taken to alternately doing yoga on his raft and leading his teammates in choruses of “Row, row, row your raft”—though they rarely paddled, even gently. But I was beginning to see the wisdom in his Zen approach. He appreciated the race as an essentially Peruvian affair: messy but full of heart, invariably entertaining, and with the kind of shambolic unpredictability that turns a good trip into a memorable adventure. It wasn’t that Rick was impervious to the hardship; he just chose to see everything as comedy rather than tragedy. By day three, Rick’s lighthearted mood had me floating easier. We decided to hack a few feet off the raft, lightening it—and our moods—considerably. Then Rick pulled alongside us. “We just saw four pink dolphins and a pod of gray dolphins,” he said, suggesting we go looking for more. We spent the afternoon mostly in the company of other boats, tying up together, falling in the water, and enjoying our last day on the river. At the finish line, Rick was exultant. “A week ago, I didn’t know I’d be doing this,” he said. “But it’s turned out to be such a great way to see the river that I might keep going.” I could relate: When I woke up the next morning in Iquitos, I missed the river, I missed my boatmates, and I missed the sense of not knowing what lay around the next bend. I saw Rick that night at a restaurant in town. He was headed out the next morning for a two-week canoe trip up the Rio Napo to Ecuador. And from there? “Aw, mate, I haven’t got the foggiest.” |
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