Myself, Niamh Stack, Dave Hollins and Fran Kohn are two weeks in to our month here in Colombia. We’ve been stunned by how beautiful it is: dramatic moutains covered in thick, lush jungles and huge canyons… a landscape that makes for some very committing sections of river!
So far we’ve paddled some amazing white water, including the big volume Suarez that really got the heart racing and the stunning multiday canyon of the Chicamocha. But the big story so far has been how one river that should have taken us 3 hours ended up taking 4 days – including two gruelling hikes out through the jungle in the dark! (read more about this epic on our trip blog)
The new Mamba is treating me very well and fitted all my multi-day gear plus camera gear in the back no worries. And it handles really well both with and without kit. Its really hot here so my Zenith shortie cag is probably my favourite new piece of kit as it doesn’t let water into my boat but also keeps me cool. That said, with all the jungle hiking we’ve been doing I’ve been pretty glad of how sturdy my Gradient boots are too… you can never underestimate the importance of shoes in the jungle
Surfing a big wave on the Suarez in the Mamba
Getting from one place to another has been an adventure in itself as we are hiring 4x4s and trucks of all shapes and sizes for our shuttles and have been squeezing our kayaks into the luggage compartments of buses for transit between regions.
We spent the past 2 days on buses to reach Villavicencio and paddled a really pretty canyon on the Guayariba today. In the next couple of days we’ll be heading out into the hills to paddle a river that requires hiking for 3 hours, but this time we’ll have mules to carry our kayaks! Pretty excited about that!
2012 is getting off to an exiting start for myself, Fran Kohn, Dave Hollins and Niamh Stack as we are just about to set off for a month of boating in Colombia.
Bags packed and ready to go…
I’m taking the new Mamba 8.1 on this trip which I’m really excited about because it seems to handle really well both with lightweight day kit and a full boat for multi-day adventures. We have a long list of rivers we’d like to get done: some of which may involve jungle hikes and sleeping in hammocks or bivis. We can’t wait!
I’ll be updating the Palm blog as often as is possible on these kinds of trips, so stay tuned and I hope to bring you tales and photos from our adventures!
For those who don’t know Olly, he is a long time Palm paddler, but more than that he is a highly regarded sea coach, guide and expedition paddler…. as well as being a formidable mountaineer!
In other words when it comes to big trips and big adventures he knows what’s what.
From the trailer and the roll call of names he’s got involved it doesn’t look like you will have to look much further for something to inspire and also guide you in your schemes and plans.
He’s locked down editing at the moment, so hopefully it won’t be long before we can all get a copy in our hands.
Continuing where our last blog post left off, we found ourselves at the small village of Bilai deep in the Papuan jungle. With the help from some locals, we had just taken 9 hrs to portage the our kit around 10km of mostly-unrunnable gorge, and needed to go back (or indeed send porters back) for our boats.
Unfortunately for us, one of the porters we’d used to carry kit to the put-in (at extortionate expense), had appeared in Bilai, and immediately told the locals that had been helping us how much the rich westerners had paid him. Now these locals wanted paying the same. “The same” amounted to about £300, and this was before they’d even consider helping us to get the boats back. Negotiations went on for a number of hours, before they accepted half of what they were asking and disappeared into the night. However, these bow-and-arrow wielding tribesmen had left a message with the people of Bilai that if we wanted our kayaks back, we’d have to cough up the remaining cash before we’d be allowed to take them. To add to our woes, it was about this point we also discovered that our carefully planned food-drop we’d arranged to be at Bilai had been raided, and about a quarter of all the food had been taken. There being no shops up here, this would cause big problems if we were to continue.
The next day Pete and Chris went to check-in at the police station and investigate what could be done about the food situation, whilst Tim investigated the availability and price of porters to retrieve the boats (ignoring the ransom issue for the time being). Upon meeting up again, Tim had good news, but Chris and Pete had bad news. The local police had decided that they wouldn’t let us continue downstream, even if we recovered the boats, as they were worried we may be kidnapped by Papuan Separatists. Worse, they wouldn’t let us even go upstream to collect the boats for the same reason. In fact, Chris and Pete had to negotiate with the police to even be allowed to leave the police station. This left us with little choice but to swallow the bitter pill of defeat and retreat from the jungle, leaving our boats behind. The icing on the cake was waking up the following morning to find Tim’s long suffering Gradient Boots had vanished into the night, leaving the choice of a bare-foot 2 hour trek to the air-strip, or someone (Pete) manning up and bringing back Chris’s shoes from the air-strip thus doing the journey three times (thanks Pete!).
Reflecting on the trip it’s so easy to play the “what-if” game. Events playing out in a slightly different manner could have made an immense difference to the outcome of the expedition. However, further reflection highlights how well we did to even get out there in the first place with a credible and safe plan that could have seen us all the way down the river. Thanks to generous sponsorship we managed to raise over £6000 towards the trip; filming for TV isn’t permitted in Papua, yet we got away with that; the permits issue can change at the drop of a hat, and we got the right stamps to allow us in to right parts of the “interior”; the charter-planes agreed to take our kayaks, and we despite a shortage of planes (one had crashed the previous week) we managed to secure ourselves one within the timeframe; we overcame major disagreements with porters; we’d even blagged free accommodation in Papua and a free helicopter ride out of the river from a start-up mining company in the area.
So, whilst the expedition’s goal wasn’t completely fulfilled, each one of us is confident that our trip wasn’t wasted. We met some incredibly friendly, helpful people, had a glimpse into true Papuan life and saw places that very few westerners have ever seen.
Three in the group was a perfect number. At the many make-or-break decisions there was always a clear majority. Stick to our guns and trek to the upper reaches of the river? Portage high (losing sight of the river hauling our gear up punishing slopes) or stick to river level hoping for a sneak with no promise of a way through? No time to second guess, there was always the next challenge ahead.
Well supplied for the challenges to come. In the footsteps of his hero Robert Falcon Scott, Chris sought out 120lbs of Dutch Butter in a Nabire store. Fortunately they were fresh out of Siberian pack ponies.
A week in transit, two days brutal jungle trek and two and a half days travelling just ten kilometres downstream brought us to the confluence of the Kemabu and Degabu rivers. We had peered into the river from halfway round the world with high resolution satellite data and overfly footage. Now we stood at the tip of the clearing where the two rivers flowed together into the Derewo and looked up ant-like at the sky.
There was only the briefest time for reflection, it was afternoon and only four useful hours until dark. With one and a half day’s food left in our boats and another ten kilometres of steeper whitewater between us and our first supply point we elected to trek again, leaving our boats behind. That evening, incoherent with exhaustion we found a hut on the trail and shared the simplest meal of sweet fire roasted potatoes and the chorizo sausage (smuggled in for our lowest ebb).
A Papuan forest trail obstacle course made more fun with kayaks.
We were trekking again the next day through kneed deep mud, over rotten log balance beams and up staircases of intertwined roots. Where the trees are thick the preferred method for trail building is to fell one of the larger trees to fall in the general direction and then hack a few machete notches along it for grip. Sodden feet and burning thighs were our world. Chris’ old faithful river shoes were giving up the ghost, held together with cable ties and pig muck. The Palm Gradient river boots fared a lot better. They were pretty much perfect jungle boots, free draining, rugged and protective. We had been drilled in the importance of caring for your feet in the jungle and now we understood why. Going barefoot was most popular in these parts (tough hardly describes the people) followed by Wellingtons or jungle boots for those who could afford them (and in the end Tim’s shoes left out to air proved too much a temptation for someone).
Back in the airstrip town of Bilai the hardest decision was yet to come, but (then and now) we all recognised that those toughest moments on the river and on the trail were the best of times.
