I awoke on January 31st, full of eager anticipation. Strangely, I wasn’t nervous at all – just anxious to be off. The family of our hostel helped us carry all of our gear and food to a dock a few blocks away, where we said our farewells. They were so good to us. They had asked us to take their pet monkey back to the jungle. It wasn’t doing very well in the city, and they wanted us to release it back into the wild. Of course, we said “Yes!!” But, alas, the monkey died the night before our departure. Billy and I decided to name our canoe “El Monito” – Little Monkey – in memory of the squirrel monkey. Austin waited with us for our canoe to arrive, and once it did and I saw it with the modifications, I knew it was perfect. We said our goodbyes to Austin, and the carpenter towed us out with his peke-peke boat, to the strong current of the Amazon. There was such a mixed bag of emotions at that moment. I had wanted to do this adventure ever since I had read a book called “Paddle to the Amazon”, or something like that, which is a story about a Canadian and his son’s journey by river from Canada to the mouth of the Amazon, by canoe. Also, my Uncle John had his own adventures on the Amazon some thirty years ago. And now it was my turn! We got settled in our canoe, Billy in front, and me in the back, the ropes were untied, and we were off!
We paddled gently from the calm water into the current, and all of a sudden, the Amazon grabbed our canoe and we shot down river. Billy and I were amazed at how fast we were moving. With barely any effort, we were moving at around 12 km/hr! As it turned out, that would rarely be the case in the coming days, but it was very reassuring at that moment.
Our first order of business was to teach Billy how to paddle. After a couple of hours of “J stroke! C stroke! Regular! Switch!” he had the basics down. The weather was nice to us that day, so it was a good time to learn. Our paddles left a lot to be desired, but we came to love them, once we got stronger. The orange paddle was the smaller of the two, but it was still huge. The blades of the paddles were shaped liked spades, and were around 1 foot wide, by 2 feet long. When stood up beside us, both paddles were up to our heads. The second paddle was just enormous, and weighed a ton. Throughout our trip, locals would get a kick out of how huge our paddles were, and they would get passed around the community for everyone to check out. At first, Billy and I had to swap paddles during the day, and we could only paddle for 3-4 hours a day, but by day four, we were alternating paddles every other day, and by day five, we were up to eight hours of paddling a day. It was crazy how quickly we built up the necessary muscles. We took pictures of ourselves early on in the trip, so we could have “before and after” shots of our muscles.
Late in the afternoon, we came across a Peruvian couple floating down the river to their community. We asked them for advice about where to stop, and they gave us a few tips. And they also gave us a bunch of fruit to take with us. Yum! The current took us into a fast channel, and we had our first lesson of the river. We saw a community coming up, so we started paddling for it. We were only a hundred meters or so from the bank, but we missed it by a huge margin. We realized then that if we were ready to stop for the day, we had to hug the bank of the river, otherwise, there was no way we would be able to fight the current to get in quick enough. This wasn’t always the case, though. It just depended on what the river was doing. Over the next week, Billy and I got very good at reading the river well in advance, and we rarely missed a place after that. Once we made it to shore, we realized that a rather large rain storm was about to hit. The children on shore ran to their dad, and Billy worked his magic to get them to let us wait out the storm in their house. The rain didn’t let up until nightfall, so we asked if we could camp on the bank of the river on a flat spot by their canoe dock. We both had to sleep in Billy’s tent, as there was no place to set up our hammocks. It was a very hot and humid night, and both Billy and I lay awake until well in the morning, soaked in sweat, and swatting at mosquitoes. We had definitely left the comforts of the city far behind!