the great amazon raft race . . . part 2

Hi there. I've been nursing some sort of fun GI bug (thanks a lot, CH), sorry it's been a while . . .

I should mention our team name was Brains over Prawn. Neatly won out over our #2 option: the Malarones . . . We were hoping that being smart would help us given that we didn't exactly . . . train.


So where were we? Oh yeah, so we set out from the beach in Nauta, birthplace of the Amazon, underwater. We quickly decided that floating took precedence over sunshade and ditched our sticks and shade. Adios, sunshade. Hello, sunburn. We were still quasi-U boat (see photo of Javier) but it was as good as it got.

Turns out Javier is such a strong paddler that with the 3 of us paddling on the opposite side as him, the boat still veered away from him. So we had to keep saying "cambio" and all of us changed paddle sides, as we zig-zagged our way down the rio Amazonas.

By the time we'd sorted ourselves out most of the rafts were teeny weeny dots on the horizon and we were in last place. We kind of took our sweet time on day 1, paddling and hanging out, figuring out how it all worked. Also figuring out where to go (directions were minimalistic). A very steep learning curve. Turns out the river flows way faster than you could ever paddle and the key is to be in the current. The hard bit is finding the current. You can be 10 feet in any direction and have a different current. And it always looks faster at the bank, even though that is rarely true. We spent lots of time arguing about visual perception, optical illusions, and apparent speed. Remember vector problems from high school? That was us.

Luckily we had planned some good raft food: bread, canned tunafish, peanuts, melon, etc. Only bad call: canned hotdogs in brine. Possibly the worst foodstuff I have ever had. We fed them to the pirañas. (See the photo of Catherine pretending to eat them.)

Anyhow we finally arrived at Porvenir, having caught a bunch of rafts, about 60k later. Porvenir is a little speck of a pueblo (town) based on subsistence living. Its main advantages: a shower, and a distillery. Very strong stuff. Also the pigs live under the latrine, eating poop. Awesome. After a mystery is-this-fish-or-meat dinner, we ate tootsie roll pops (yumster). After dark, we hung out in our tents (bedtime: 9 pm), listening to a few of Colin's friends being silly and laughing our butts off.

Day 2 we were up at 5 to perform some raft modification. This day was the longest, about 68k we were told. When we started off at 7, we were actually in the mix, doing well. We were focused on beating The Sisterhood, this group of british women who were pretty hard core. They had done some english channel crossing by paddling and had set a record. They brought carbon fiber paddles and . . . some brought silicone, if you know what I mean. Quite bionic-looking. We were told that after this little "creek" shortcut we only had 45 min left . . . which actually was about 3 hours. The race organization was somewhat haphazard. Saw the tail of a pink dolphin but sadly not more. We were muertos when we arrived at the town of Tamshiyacu. It was 8 hours of paddling with about 10 min of break for eating . . . and peeing. It was hard to motivate to move to shower, brush teeth or do, well, anything.

It promptly poured rain when we arrived, and we took advantage to cool off. By this point a british lady and a peruvian man had already quit the race from heat stroke. We went through about 8L of water a day, just on the river. After eating our roast chicken lunch (extra mayo, please!) we were off to find a hostel. The Sisterhood and The Brotherhood had already scammed the two best in town, but we found a little one at the edge of town for 12 soles a night. Bed, rainwater shower, and it felt like the lap of luxury. Minus the bat flying around . . . of course.

And then, off to dinner. Colin H and Amie got to enjoy some patacones (aka tostones - yummy disks of fried, salted unripe plantain). Afterwards the town threw us a little dance festival of native dance. Pretty cool. It included teenage girls running around in bras. Some of the older male rowers were huge fans.

Catherine, Colin and Scott got in the mix when they invited the crowd, doing flips and generally getting sweaty. After some late nite hostel hallway antics from Alden, Colin (H) and Scott, some fous rires, we passed out again.





Day 3 dawned stormy, and we were missing supplies off our raft. After scurrying about to find them, everyone was thrilled to be off for the last day (almost done!!). Total chaos at the start, as per usual (can you spot us in the photo?). For much of day 3 we were neck and neck with a group of Kaiser docs, a Brotherhood raft, and a guys raft where we knew one of them as "South Africa" (never could remember his name). Day 3 was all-out as we were all psyched to get to the finish . . .

We rowed our hearts out on day 3 (7 hours, all told). There was a long stretch of super-wide river where we felt we were going very slowly. Lots of locals stood on the side of the river, waving at us and watching us go by (probably thinking "que gringos locos"). We were given directions to take the 2nd left fork upriver at the Nanay river. No one told us that the river forked before Iquitos and we were to take the left fork. So once we realized other groups were going left, we killed ourselves getting to the left shore and had to backtrack a ways, running our raft along the shore. After this we had about another hour or so of rowing, full steam, with other rafts nearby. I started getting a little too overheated and confused, and couldn't wait to be done.

We finally got to the river Nanay and had a quarter mile upriver to row. The Amazon, I should mention was 2 meters higher than normal and flowing fast! So upriver was hard work, but we could see a giant crowd gathered at the finish line. Thankfully between Javi's counting out strokes and Colin's motivational words, we cleared ahead of a boat of 4 big guys to beat them right at the finish. Upon which, we all fell off the raft from exhaustion and heat while a few local boys took care of our raft (never saw it again, good riddance!).


Our cumulative time over 3 days for 180 kilometers was 19 hours. Here's an NPR story about the winners. We finished 21 out of 57 overall, 12th of the international group (about 30 rafts) and 4th in the mixed men's and women's division. Hot stuff!! It was so fun . . . I'm not sure that I would ever do it again. It's a once-in-a-lifetime race, and I mean that.

The race made the front page of the national newspaper, El Comercio. We could make out Aime in one of the shots. Luckily we all had a lovely take-home souvenir: a nasty rash from contact with the water, so we got to remember the Amazon for a few more days. good times!

After a rejuvenating dinner in Iquitos, (yummy fish) a few more moto taxi near-death experiences, we were done. Back to Lima, lovable pollution, Chuqui, and all. I was never so happy to be home!


If you get inspired, the raft race is yearly in September, and I can give you advice. And again, thank you all for your support for LimaKids. Sincerely appreciated.

Couple more great pics:
Our team in a moto taxi and the "before" team pic.




N.B. To those who want to do this in the future: the key is straight logs, thick ones (for flotation). The catamaran design is good for not having to switch positions all the time, but it probably has more drag. We had to work a lot harder than many other rafts. This year's winning design, a long version of 4 + 4 logs, is now illegal. Also, light paddles (the opposite of ours) wouldn't kill you. Loads more advice where that came from . .
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the great amazon raft race . . . part 1

Finally recovered enough to tell you all about our Amazon trip. First off thanks so much to everyone who donated. We raised about $1200 for LimaKids and Dr. Moore was thrilled with the response. It being not a behemoth organization, that money goes a long way. If you still want to donate, just head to http://www.limakids.org/.

Right, back to the trip. First off we flew into Iquitos. In the airport in Lima before we left, though, we managed to run into a local football (soccer) sensation, Leao Butrón. He's the goalie of the national football team who just defeated Argentina in a major upset the week before. We all agreed he was muy guapo, and very nice about being harassed. Then we had to pay the insanely stupid amount of either $3.71 or s/ 10.27 in airport tax (really!?!). Once landing in Iquitos, we spotted rival paddlers at the airport (British, all wearing matching outfits) well prepared with carbon fiber paddles, and we set off in moto taxis to our safe haven.

Iquitos is deliciously seedy. It has the feel of a jungle outpost where old pirates and people with warrants for their arrest go to hide out. The locals are friendly, but many verge on con artists (for example, faking an empty gas tank in an attempt to double the moto taxi fare). We stayed at La Casa Fitzcarraldo, a lovely little B&B on Ave. Marina. The Swiss owner, it seems, was the producer of a Herzog film, Fitzcarraldo, about a rubber baron who dreamed of building opera houses in iquitos and had a 320 ton steamer ship carried up and over a waterfall by locals (in the movie version, at least). Anyhow, fabulous breakfasts, cold showers. My favorite bit was the 5 story tree house with the pet snake on the 3rd floor. Minus the boa, I would have given my right hand to play in such a tree house as a kid. Oh, and there was an ocelot (painted leopard) in a cage right outside the dining room. Humane-treatment issues aside, it bit Colin's finger and made him bleed. He was trying to pet it, though, to be fair.

Anyhow on day 2 we set out to get all our supplies: plastic chairs, machetes, saws, rope, food, buckets, duct tape, life jackets. You know, the usual. We ended up in Belén, a part of town which is flooded in the rainy season and in which people build there homes on wooden rafts, which they moor to poles when it floods. There's an open air market (where we haggled with the Chinese for our gear) and also a cool medicine lane called Pasaje Paquito (according to wiki, though finding street signs is rather a joke) where jungle plants and animals are sold for medicinal purposes at all these stands. Had I known what on earth they were I would perhaps have been tempted to try some out. (view above from end of market over iquitos)

After a stop for some refueling plantains which burnt my tongue to a cinder (see pic), Colin and I were off to the Naval Research Lab (US Navy, that is) to meet up with a friend-of-a-friend, Dr. Amy Morrison, a dengue researcher, to borrow paddles while Catherine and Javier went back to the boating supply shop to try to convince them to get off their duffs and go get 12 lifejackets from their mysterious supply place. This all involved running back and forth to the hotel and all around the city in moto taxis. My favorite bit: the windshields, made out of plastic sheeting and boarded by wood. They don't go all the way up and the driver looks over them at the road. Works quite well, actually.

Moving on . . . we left quite early the next morning on buses (5 of them, i think) to Nauta, the start of our rafting journey. Took only 2 hours (remember that, when I get to the return journey). After enduring some mild sexual harassment from a crew member off the winning boat, and spilling my hot-milk-in-a-bag on my lap (YOU try drinking hot milk from a hole in a bag), we arrived in Nauta. There we endured a couple of hours of welcome speeches.

The highlight, truly, was this Canadian guy, David, who was celebrating his 71st birthday that day. And yes, he has a tattoo of a snake on his knee. And a pierced ear. And a red mohawk. Pretty much the most bad-ass guy I've ever seen over the age of 50. He was super nice, too. Too bad we didn't get to hear his stories . . .

After lunch we all set off with our gear onto this rickety boat (sort of mississippi paddleboat-esque) across the amazon to a beach island. The plan was to make our raft and camp out there. The one thing that became evident at this point in time is that organization was kinda minimal. We were supposed to get in order of our boats to select our 8 logs of balsawood with which to build our raft. After boat 3 of 57, this plan started falling apart and Javi and I (latin and french) started grabbing our logs. Catherine and Colin (and many other anglo-saxon types) calmly waited their turn while a free for all ensued. Classic multicultural mayhem. Anyhow we then had 8 logs of balsa and 4 small sticks of balsa, plus our machete, saw, and a bunch of rope and the goal was to turn it into an amazon-worthy craft. Yeesh!

After about 4 hours of trying to approximate the work of the locals we had made considerable progress, but still hadn't lashed any logs together. Given that we only had 1 hour of daylight left, and a little group of local boys and teens had come over to watch us, with concerned looks on their faces, we finally conceded to the plan almost all gringos do, and paid 20 soles to get help. In about 2 hours, they redid our work better than we had done it, plus lashed it all together with all the necessary joins. Turns out, they know what they are doing.

It should be mentioned that some people decided to forego the traditional route and that the sound of chainsaws could we heard well into the night. By 9 pm we were exhausted and we just chilled by the campfire watching the clearest milky way i've seen since the middle of the Atlantic. We weren't aware until way past dark that there was such a thing as a raft that didn't float, but at that point we were too tired to lug ours to the beach to test, so I passed out sending up small prayers that our raft would float . . .


Up at the crack of 5, we worked furiously to test our raft (floated-ish!) cut off the legs of our chairs, lash them to the boat, assemble a sun shade, secure our food bucket . . . and all of a sudden at 830 all the other rafts were already on the water and we were being told it was time to go. Never mind that we thought the start was at 9. So we hussled on the river, to join up. Our boat did NOT float with the bucket, our gear, and the sunshade. We were distinctly U-boatesque. While not an unpopular style on the river, it didn't bode well for getting anywhere fast.

More on our u-boat next entry . . . I know you're just dying of suspense.

updates on various things

1. The research:
I'm at the point of handing in my first/ revised versions of IRBs to 3 different ethics committees. However I just got an email that the hospital where I plan to do my study, Hospital Nacional Dos de Mayo (picture of Santa Rosa, the ID ward I'll be working in, at right), is partaking in a national doctor's strike. I'm not sure what this means, exactly, for me, but I will doubtless waste 3 hours going all the way there and back on tuesday for naught. In other news, I have managed to stump not 1 but 2 statisticians at the National Institutes of Health with pleas to help me with my sample size calculations. Despite our best efforts, no progress has been made. I think I may have to simplify and retool. One thing I have learned is that sample size precision is an illusion. If you calculate a number based on A, B, and C, where A-C are numbers you've had to make up out of thin air for lack of better data, what are the odds that your answer will be true? Are you a betting man?

2. The amazon trip.
Have just come back from a few beers at Juanito's with Colin and David Moore. Dr. Moore filled our head with hard-won wisdom from last year's race. Amongst the best: the support boat and the coast guard leave in the morning and you don't seem them till you arrive at the landing site at night (which is unmarked). there are no maps or signs . . . at various fork points, you will have to guess. Make a hard left and paddle upriver when you get to Iquitos because otherwise you will shoot right past and miss the city.

Very reassuring. However the summary feeling is that it will be: 1) total chaos, 2) total annhiliation by the local teams who have what we call "experience" making rafts, paddling them, and navigating the amazon, and 3) a lot of fun. Have I mentioned that the British contingent may be bringing someone tabloid-worthy? Odd, odd, odd. The good news is apparently there are few mosquitos on the Amazon itself, and the piranhas mostly stick to the tributaries, so my odds of getting eaten or catching malaria are low. Always a bonus.

Btw, Juanito's is a bar disguised as a bodega general store (see pic I found online). Best bar in Lima, so far. Many Limeños agree. I'll have to take pics. It's got beer and a few tapas and is so relaxed it's insane. I love it. We met a guy who David knew who is one of the LimaKids coaches, really excited for his 12 and under team to hopefully make tourney finals next weekend. Oh, and apparently he happens to be a successful businessman, but he's very charmingly worked up about this kid, who he is training to be a goalie, who takes it very hard when a goal is scored on him. Best bit: the dress code is, to be honest, sloppy. Any more and you are overdressed. Barranco (our hood) rocks.

There is an amazing culture, from what I can tell, of little bodegas all over the city serve as little bars/ gossip centers at night. All the men go to play cards, the women catch up there. Very multipurpose and very cool.

3. Spanish
Having learned my spanish the way that native speakers do when they are two years old, with zero formal training whatsoever, I have a freakish combination of a good accent, decent vocabulary, and random, startling gaps. For example, I just learned the alphabet three weeks ago. Who knew that the spanish did the "greek i" thing for "y" just like the french? I'm also looking for an intermediate level but well-written Spanish book to read. Any suggestions? And though I did get this suggestion many times, no, paulo coelho is brazilian, and did not write in Spanish. He's quite good, though, we can agree there.

Roger, over and out.

ps. if you have not yet donated to LimaKids and still want to, there is time! David said that he's been thrilled with the response. We haven't quite met the goal that we set, though, so please do contribute - even if you think it's very little it goes a long way here. These kids are orphans or living on the streetand for these kids the soccer team is the first time they are doing something "normal" kids do. Also LimaKids is working on a project to help overcome some of the obstacles to getting these kids healthcare, since many of these kids are undocumented and therefore can't access proper care . . . We (and they) really appreciate the support

muy amable

So peruvians might be the nicest people on earth. They really go out of their way to get you sorted. Oh, an example? Well, Catherine and I got on the wrong combi one day, coming back from surfing. It supposedly went to Barranco but really just cut tangentially through the edge. When we realized we were headed to Chile, we went to get off and about 4 people told us "No! . . . it's not safe here". One man adopted us, and had us get out with him at his stop in a safer place. Then, he waited with us and made sure we got on the right combi to get home. On the next combi the cobrador tried to overcharge because we looked gringita that day but the rest of the passengers argued with him and then he noticed Catherine's eyes, fell in love, and we were safe at the baseline 1 sole rate. Just a typical day . . .

But anytime I am lost or have a question, people don't just answer. They answer kindly, with patience, and they show an interest. They want to know where you are from, where you learned Spanish, how long you've been here. And they really care! It's super nice. I frequently have long conversations with my taxi drivers and learn about how their daughters are doing in school, and they learn all about me, and advise me to get a peruvian husband. This is your basic get to know you convo:
1. What country are you from? Do you like Peru?
2. How long have you been in Peru? How long are you staying?
3. Where are you living?
4. What are you doing here?
5. Are you married or single? How old are you?

and occasionally: do you cook or eat in the street (street food vendors)? this, only women ask.

Yup, basically this all goes down in about 3 min. It's just the vital stats they have to have in order to get to know you. I think soltera was one of the first 20 words I learned in Spanish

Today I went to Dos de Mayo to present my study to the ID docs there and get their input. On the way we got stuck in much-more-than-usual traffic. Turns out right at the park in front of the hospital there was a big street fair with lots of food being sold, a jumping castle, hats, wooden spoons, bootleg dvds, and a couple of monkeys doing tricks. After my presentation I sought out lunch. There was cuy (guinea pig), pork, lots of soup stews, breads, plantains, and other yumminess. I settled on the chicharon (fried pork rind) with potatoes and rice (i know mom, potatoes are considered a veg here) and sat next to these nice ladies. They helped me sort out the system (pay 1 guy for the food, another for the inca kola) and even had me try their dessert (some sweet brown slop made from a fruit i've never heard of before). After lunch we kissed goodbye and they wished me luck. So sweet, so kind.

Also Catherine has noticed (and she's right!) we have yet to see one single unhappy peruvian kid. No tantrums, no tears. I love Perú!

remind me to tell you more about inca kola later! also will try to bring my camera out more so you can share with me the sights (sorry can't share the yummy flavors).

we're gonna race down the amazon on a raft we build with our bare hands

Yup, you read that right. Catherine, Colin, Marjory and a yet to be named 4th are gonna race in the Amazon Raft Race 2008. We'll go to Iquitos, the biggest city in the world that you can't drive to (only plane or boat), build a raft out of balsawood logs, and then race down 132 miles of Amazon over 3 days. Colin thinks it'll look something like the picture below but since machetes , gloves, and a first aid kit are on the supply list it'll probably be less glam . . .

But here's where you come in: We are raising money for LimaKids, a very worthwhile organization devoted to helping street kids in Lima through activities including a street clinic and soccer league. We'll deduct the $150 entry fee from the donations (for materials, bus, tents, some meals), and the 4 of us will contribute our costs for airfare and hotel for the first and last night to the cause.

How do you sign up to be part of this madcap adventure? Two ways:


1. Click on the donate button. This will paypal it to us and we'll take it from there.

if that doesn't work try this:



2. If you're gonna donate a chunk of change and need a tax receipt, go straight to LimaKids. Just let us know please how much was donated so we can report back our total (we'll keep your anonymity if so desired).

If you want to see how it went for Mark, last year's fellow, check out his blog.