Amazon Woman: Facing Fears, Chasing Dreams, and a Quest to Kayak the World's Largest River From Source to Sea by Darcy Gaechter

Amazon Woman: Facing Fears, Chasing Dreams, and a Quest to Kayak the World's Largest River From Source to Sea by Darcy Gaechter

Author:Darcy Gaechter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2020-03-03T00:00:00+00:00


AUGUST 24, 2013

DAY 28 OF THE EXPEDITION

After twenty hours of purging himself, Midge felt well enough to paddle. He’d managed to keep down a chocolate bar and some water. We estimated it would take us four hours of paddling to make it from yesterday’s stopping point back to Puerto Prado—a comparatively easy day. We loaded the kayaks back into the canoe and motored up the river to our exact stopping point—not near it, but the exact spot down to the specific rock that marked the point where we’d gotten out of our kayaks.

After two hours of paddling, we came across a group of about twenty Asháninka men, women, and children who were yelling and waving at us. We knew what their peculiar waves meant. With their palms facing down, arms outstretched then drawn back toward their bodies—almost like they were mimicking a back hoe in motion—they were calling us over to them.

This was not good.

“Shit,” we said almost in unison.

Our activities over the past twenty-four hours undoubtedly seemed weird to the Asháninka. Motoring past them heading downriver the afternoon before, then motoring back upriver this morning, then paddling back down the river now. Besides the fact that they have come to view every outsider as a threat, and tourism is not a thing that exists in their territory, we were doing extra-strange stuff. Being singled out as a source of trouble for the Asháninka was the last position I had hoped to be in.

We felt that stopping could be the wrong choice. This village was not one of our official checkpoints. It was a Saturday afternoon so there was a good chance the men would be drunk. If they were drunk, then the best case is that they would hassle us, maybe search our kayaks, but it wouldn’t be a pleasant interaction. Worst case, well, we didn’t really want to think about that. Remembering that in 2011 Jaroslaw Frackiewicz and Celina Mroz, who were canoeing down the river, were murdered by three drunk Asháninka men with shotguns and machetes, we decided that stopping seemed unwise.

And yet, not stopping also seemed like a bad idea. We thought of Davey du Plessis, a South African who had set out to paddle this part of the Amazon River alone in 2012. He had been shot multiple times with a shotgun by two Asháninka men who pursued him in their motorized canoe. The rumor is that these men wanted him to stop and he didn’t. He got lucky and survived, but barely. With shotgun pellets lodged in his arm, neck, spine, face, skull, and one in his heart, he had a harrowing thirty-six-hour journey to get to the hospital in Pucallpa. Incapacitated, he was passed from village to village, being shuffled among people who wanted to help him but who were also afraid of his attackers.

We had a lot of things to consider in the minute that we had to make our decision. Besides the language barrier, being unable to understand each other’s backgrounds, fears, and hopes all made this decision a total crapshoot.



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