Into the Belly of Bolivia (cont.)

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Into the Belly of Bolivia (cont.)

Day seven of our Tuichi expedition started ominously. We'd entered San Pedro Canyon the night before and there was a certain nervous tension as we prepared to spend the day running what Sergio promised was a series of Class-IV-plus rapids. It didn't help that there was a cold rain or that half of the crew was weak from intestinal bugs or that all of us were desperately trying not to create any open wounds by scratching our numerous sand-fly bites. I stood with Pancho near the river's edge as he offered his daily prayers to Pachamama. After dropping the leaves onto the ground, he arched an eyebrow, then got to his feet and stalked off. There was no thumbs-up this day.

The Tuichi had changed. There was a rumble, a growl, a force to it that we hadn't felt upstream. The river had risen significantly during the last 16 hours of rain and it was possible that rapids that had been Class IVs yesterday would be Class Vs today. Sergio had told me the night before that he'd first been struck by the idea of running the river after reading Back from Tuichi, a book by Israeli Yossi Ghinsberg, which relates the story of his ill-fated 1981 expedition. His log raft had broken apart in the rapids, and for two weeks he'd wandered the forest until being rescued. Pancho, it turned out, had lost one of his logging partners when their raft broke apart and pinned the man underwater. Sergio had made the first complete descent of the Tuichi in 1996, and ours was the fourth

"official" one. "This is not a river to take lightly," Sergio told us. "Something bad happens out here, and we're on our own." If this was understatement, we were in for a hell of a ride.

Immediately after leaving camp we hit a boiling Class IV and then a series of Class III rollers. The crew in my paddle boat barely had time to catch a breath when we came upon the next rapid, a Class IV that had a hard left turn where the river slammed into a rock face and then dumped over a mid-river rock into a raft-gobbling hole. Digging in, we made the turn with enough momentum to launch over the hole. It was only 9 a.m. and we were whipped.

The canyon narrowed in places to less than a hundred feet, and the force of the water sometimes made it difficult to hear Chuck's commands. The kayakers, Beverly, Pete, and Kevin, were having a high old time, though it was a little more serious work for Sergio, Greg, Smiling Dave (a river guide in Alaska), and Matt on the oars of the heavy, gear-burdened rafts. Just after clearing an unexpectedly powerful Class IV called Bandera Roja, Matt got too close to the raft in front of him and had to backpaddle.

"It killed my momentum," he said afterward, "and the next thing I knew we'd dropped into a hole and couldn't clear it."

It might've been almost funny watching the raft slowly flip and catapult its passengers into the water if there'd been any decent eddies. As the upside-down raft shot by, one of the paddlers in my boat leaped onto it from our bow and managed to keep it close to shore until enough people gathered to flip it back over.

The next section of rapids involved some Class IIIs and easy Class IVs that provided some respite before the monster Sergio was anticipating at Puerto del Diablo. But as we got close, one of the kayakers dropped into a hole and found herself pushed under a ledge. After trying three times to roll, she decided to bail out of her kayak and swim to the surface. But by now she was exhausted and numb from the cold water. Slightly downstream from her, Sergio could see that she was no longer swimming and might be in trouble.

"I threw the safety line and then she went under again," he recalled later. "When she came up she had it wrapped around her neck. Obviously, I didn't want to pull on it, but we were drifting downstream right into Puerto del Diablo. I knew if I didn't get her in the boat before we hit it, she'd be a goner." Screaming at her to swim and pulling at the rope, Sergio managed to get her to the boat in time to swing it into the last big eddy.

It took us two and a half hours to scout and run Puerto del Diablo. The rain had transformed what was normally scary enough Class V whitewater into 200 yards of solid, terrifying froth. A series of huge waves and holes made it necessary to cut far right, ferry left, and then get into position to miss a giant slab of rock in the center of the river. Bad positioning for this final maneuver meant getting pinned against the rock by an unrelenting force of water. Not a pleasant thought. While scouting Diablo I slipped on a mossy rock, fell a few feet, and cut my leg, but too much was happening to pay any attention to it.

The run itself went by in an adrenaline blur. Though I was digging hard, looking ahead, and trying to hear Chuck's commands, I remember at one point the raft dropped suddenly off a big wave into a hole—I looked up into a sky of white foam and screamed, "Pachamama!"

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