The Worlds Longest Raft Race

Knowing little to nothing about what to expect, we embarked on a 4 day rafting trip down the mighty Amazon River. We (check out the photo above), Nathanie (far left), Casey (second from left), Felix (third from left), and myself, had been planning for this race since the first of this year. When I say planning, the idea was to go out paddling, do pushups, sit-ups, exercise, etc… It is safe to say that we barely fit in our supply run the night before.

Day number one was spent bussing to a town about two hours away to get our supplies i.e. paddles, life jackets, 8 logs (each one 15 feet long), rope, nails, and a tent to sleep in. When we arrived at our destination, it was a fight for dear life to get logs. The process of selecting your logs was supposed to be monitored, but, it was not done well and sadly we were one of the last to arrive. After finally getting everything in order, we were allowed to begin constructing the raft with 2 hours of daylight left… Thanks to a friendly local, we were able to complete it just before dinner (she was awesome).

That night was unique. We were given an army tent (which was made for 6, short, Peruvians) and we crammed in 9 Americans. It rained all night long, we slept on nasty mats, we snuggled with 5 Americans we had just met a few hours earlier, there were a plethora of mosquitoes, and needless to say we slept horribly.

Day two, we quickly shot ahead of 5 teams and then quickly were passed by what felt like all 35 teams. It took us the better have of the morning (we started at 8 am) to figure out who should sit where –we kept veering to the right. It also took some time figuring out the currents, when to rest, rowing is tiring, and that the saying, “oh yeah, the finish line is just around that corner up there,” translates to, “2 hours up there, past 5 corners, you will be able to see the finish line.” Oh well. It was fun. We saw some magnificent pink dolphins and finished the day in 6 hours and in 17^th place out of 35 teams –we even passed a hard core female team –which was not too shabby.

Day three started at 7 am after another beautiful night crammed into a tiny tent with 9 people, rain, mosquitoes, and drunken people partying in front of our tent and bright lights on until 5:30 am. Needless to say, we were all rested up. This proved to be the toughest, longest day. It felt like the day went on for ever. We were extremely sore, trying not to complain, but still enjoying the scenery. Today we learned that when you ask, “how much farther is it?” and the answer is, “just 20 minutes up there around that corner on the left,” this really means, “it is 2 hours or more up around many corners on the right side of the river.” We placed 18^th with a time of 9 hours for the day.

Day four had us all pumped. We knew it was the last day, and we had managed to square away a little hotel room the night before that the four of us crammed into (it had two beds, but still better than sleeping with 9) for only $8.00. It was beautiful. It had a personal shower, bathroom, fan and mosquito proof netting –we slept like kings.

We looked at the map this time, and had a fairly good idea of where to go. We found some slow currents at first (the course of the race had us veer off into a tributary) which provided some great swimming and playing, and then later on we found some extremely fast currents. Today was dubbed the “no complaining day” so it was comical to voice our problems and pain into a “positive” form of communication.

In order to displace boredom and sore muscles, we rowed to the count of 300-500 and then took a 2 minute break. We followed this pattern for about 1.5 hours, and quickly found ourselves passing a few teams and pulling ahead of the back of the pack. Sadly, the finish line was up a river (against the current) about a quarter mile. This would not be too bad, except when you are built like a barge, and are plowing water, it makes rowing upstream difficult. If, and when, any one of us stopped rowing, we started going backwards –it was depressing. We were able to finally reach the finish line that felt so close, but was so far in 6 hours (we came in 17^th place out of 35). We even finished ahead of a team of Peruvian women that kept screaming in our ears, “Beat those white boys!”

All in all it was an awesome experience. The food was good, sleeping arrangements interesting, the race quite disorganized, tons of really nice people, sub-par communication, but an adventure down a beautiful river filled with incredible and breathe taking wildlife (we saw tons of birds, pink dolphins, fish, mosquitoes, beautiful and uninhabited jungle, and friendly, local, people). It was an unbelievable raft race which we eagerly await for to compete in September of next year –but not one month sooner.

Here we are trying desperately to construct our raft. We had some curvey logs!

Here is a photo of our raft after day one of rowing. It actually floated!

We had a beautiful rainbow finish line after day one. It was amazing.

We had some locals greeting us as we came across the finish line with their beating drums. You can see some of the other rafts in the water.