Fear and Boating on the Rio Marañon (Part 1)

Chapter 1

Is This It?

After four days of waiting, we finally got the call to meet in a warehouse in Trujillo where our guide, Pedro, and all the gear we would need for the next twelve days was stored and waiting for us. This, after many conflicting stories which left us wondering if this whole trip was even going to happen. We quickly packed our camp at our hostel in the beach town of Huanchaco and hailed a cab out on the unpaved main drag. Speeding along in a bucket of bolts which nearly gave up the ghost at every makeshift speed bump along the way, our driver asked, yet again, what the address was and eventually solicited strangers all over town for advice on finding the place. He ended up getting us to within a block of the address we'd given him. We paid him, then began to walk the crowded streets of a massive outdoor market toward, what we hoped, would be a sanctuary of like minded river people in a dirty city full of long sideways glances in our direction.

Huanchaco, Peru. We stayed here for nearly a week, surfing and waiting on news of our trip.

We found a small placard with the correct address, knocked on the nondescript blue metal door and waited. Nothing happened. We knocked again and looked up and down the street for some kind of sign that we were standing outside of an international rafting company whom we had transferred nearly $1,500 a person the week before. Still no signs of life.

A small town high in the Andes. Our road can be seen in the background, winding from sea-level to 12,000ft at the crest of the pass.

A woman a few doors down waved us over and Laura, her Spanish rusty from a few years atrophy, was able to glean from her rapid fire responses that the woman had never heard of Sierra Rios, nor had she ever seen any rafting equipment of any kind on the block. She did mention, for some reason we'll never understand, that the people behind the blue door had gone surfing that morning and had not returned yet. She told us to come have a drink and a snack at her place if we couldn't find our friends. We thanked her and parted more confused than when we started.

At the end of the trash bestrewn street was a pay phone, so we decided to give our only phone contact a call and ask for some more directions. The damn thing ate our money.

I folded my hands on my head and puffed a big sigh from my chest. Laura looked at me and asked what the hell we should do now and I responded with a less than reassuring "Uhhh..."

In that moment of indecision came a small man known as Gallo, or Rooster, in a blue sleeveless shirt and flip flops. He asked us simply, "Rio Marañon?" "Sî" We replied in unison. Without further ado he spun on his heel and walked back to the same blue metal door we had banged on twenty minutes earlier and led us through a side door into a cramped hallway filled with oars, dry bags and coolers. We'd made it.

Our lead guide Pedro, after coming out of the bathroom, explained to us that the rafts we were supposed to be using were tied to some trees well upriver of our put in. On a river with multiple sections of raftable water, it is common for a company to run a trip on an upriver section, then when the guests from that trip leave, the next guests arrive at the same location and begin their trip where the last one left off. This way, you have to move a lot less gear around and in some cases the guides can have a night to themselves between trips to relax and unwind from the last experience and prepare themselves for the next group. The trip before us, however, found the upstream section so terrifying (after three flips and multiple long rapids) that they chose the less than appealing option of hiking out of a 5,000 ft deep canyon over the course of two days with all of their vital belongings. For some people, this would have set off a red flag, for me, it merely warranted the internal dialogue of "well obviously those guys suck at boating and shouldn't have been on class V whitewater." We had specifically signed up for the less intense Class III-IV section so that we would feel comfortable on a completely foreign stretch of river. There have only been about 50 commercial descents of this river, the first descent having occurred a couple years ago, so information on the rapids is not nearly as simple to find as, say, the Colorado river running through the Grand Canyon. Pedro then explained that we were getting the equipment that was available, the equipment that was not being used by the many trips occurring at this time all over South America. Essentially, what we were getting was the old crap that barely held air, or not even that. We shrugged this news off, having done many dirt bag trips in our time. In fact Laura and I were fresh off a 14 day Cataract Canyon trip on the Green River which only cost $100 a person due to the diligent thrift of our mentor and friend, Nelbert Neimi. On that trip, we ate chilli from a tin can that resembled a bucket of brown paint that had been rusting in the back of my grandpa's garage for the last 25 years. We had to pump up one tube of Nelbert's personal raft three or four times a day just to keep it floating. Our kitchen equipment was covered in thick black soot that is still clinging to my river gear. We were prepared for a little bit of shoddy equipment. Pedro smiled and regaled us with the story of leading a dozen students from Appalachia State University's Recreation Program up and out of the canyon which had given them such a hard time. He had just made it back to Trujillo the night prior and was eager to get back on the river.

Nelbert Neimi, circa 2016 on the Green River in Utah. Nelbert's first time on this section of river was 50 years ago, when he was just getting his start in river running at the age of 25.

About an hour later a gigantic truck pulled up outside the warehouse and we began to fireline equipment for 13 people and 12 days from the warehouse out onto the sidewalk. As we did this, the old woman who had never heard of a rafting company on her street watched from her metal grated front door without a hint of irony. We stacked the rolled up rafts, kayaks, coolers, dry bags, water containers, oar frames and personal gear into the truck and hopped into a 14 passenger van with the rest of our crew from Oregon and Idaho to set off on a two day drive from sea level to 12,000 feet to find our put in.