The Pongo — close to death experience
This story is about an epic two week journey we made through the jungle. We followed a route we’d read about in the South American Explorer’s Club magazine, and we did it in reverse. Four of us got together. Ruben, a tour guide in Huancayo, was hoping to use this route with tourists in the future. As a result, he’d done some planning and we had at our disposal a boat. A brand, spanking new boat made solely for the new tourist route and we were to be the guinea pigs.
From Huancayo then, we set off to Satipo by bus admiring the dramatic scenery change from sierra to selva, mountains to Amazon basin; from sparse Andean plains and distant jagged mountains, to glistening green jungle hills as the bus drove down, hugging the steep hillsides, nearly 3000 metres in seven hours.
We drove past the edge-of-the-jungle town San Ramon and through its busier sister town La Merced. Little did I know then that I’d return many times to those towns, in Chanchamayo district as I married a man from the region.
From Satipo we took a colectivo (shared car) to Puerto Ocopa where we stayed the night and enjoyed a meal we would be eating three times a day, every day over the next week, chicken and rice and bananas or plantains, jungle food. I was no stranger to this dish having eaten it at least once every other day since I arrived in Ecuador a year before.
In the morning at 7am though, there was a slight variation in the menu, chicken soup which was so good it’s worth a mention here, we caught the ‘ferry’ to Atalaya. A seven-hour journey down the Tambo river in a wooden longboat crammed with schoolteachers for the new term, babies and baggage. It was uneventful apart from stopping at a basic restaurant for chicken, rice and the slightly alcoholic mazato (yuca juice fermented with spit) and we chatted to the locals about our planned route. They all knew about the pongo that we would encounter and thought we were crazy. The Pongo de Mainique is a 3km long deep gorge on the Urubamba river. The Urubamba is 200–300 metres wide in this area but narrows to 80 metres as it squeezes through a rock faced gorge, or pongo as they’re known here. On the geographical map it hinted at excitements and likely very beautiful scenery with cliff faces rising on either side at 600 metres. Several waterfalls flowed into the gorge making it particularly impressive. And notoriously dangerous in the wet season (it was wet season). Everyone we chatted to spoke of it with awe. What were we letting ourselves in for?
In Atalaya we were delayed for three days. While the boat owner, the profe (a retired teacher), rapidly organised makeshift seats and a roof for this new boat of ours (we’d arrived two months earlier than expected apparently), we discussed the options and eventually negotiated a deal with his wife and the driver. It was going to cost a lot more in petrol than originally thought but one look at the other forms of transport to get to the start of the hike, paying the extra money was infinitely preferable, and made it more likely we’d actually get there, although that too was uncertain. We could have gone halfway in a small cargo boat but both the marine authorities and ourselves said no way. It was overloaded to the point of capsizing with several 45 gallon fuel drums, thousands of bottles of Inca Kola, hundreds of wheelbarrows, four rowing boats and several families.
Finally, it was time to leave the safety of the town of Atalaya where we’d eaten enough juanes (sticky rice and chicken wrapped tightly in a banana leaf parcel and boiled) to last a lifetime. The profe had done us proud, managing to fix a roof of rusty metal bars and plastic sheeting, five seats, one of which had been taken from an old bus and stood above the rest at the back of the boat. That was to be my chair he said; being the only girl in this motley bunch of hikers in a macho nation, I was to be honorary captain and needed the comfiest, and most protected seat from the rain. We set off up the Urubamba on what was to be a three day ride to a village where the road started and where the river was no longer navigable.
Day one to Sepahua was hot and soporific and we fell asleep in the sun until we reached our destination two hundred kilometres upstream. Sepahua is a small town set up by Shell twenty years ago when they began their explorations for oil and, later, gas. It’s a prosperous place and expensive, receiving almost all their supplies by air and heavy, non-perishables by boat. It was very hot with lots of new, weird bugs to inspect as they bit our sensitive white arms. Jungle animals are elusive here though, I was sorry not to see pink river dolphins. We spent the night in a hotel made of plywood where all conversations could be heard. Richie had been chatting to a couple of guys in the room next door, telling them our names and what we were up to and I later fell asleep listening to their rants wondering whether Natasha, me, I guessed would marry them. Sweet dreams. A mining town, there were very few women: a few hardy wives and prostitutes to break up the monotony of hard work, beer and pool tables.
Very early in the morning it started to rain. Hard. A leak in the roof brought a waterfall cascading into the room and onto our rucksacks. It rained all day and everything got wet on the boat anyway. We had an extra passenger today to share the fuel cost. There was only space for one extra person and the boys hoped for a moment it would be a sixteen year old girl going back to study in Cusco but it ended up being a nice, quiet guy with a juane and a machete for luggage. Like everyone else, he thought we were mad to be going through the pongo and wanted to be dropped off at a village just before it. Our fate in the pongo was postponed as night drew in and we camped in a large abandoned hut in Timpia, a village set up and then left by missionaries. After going on a wild goose chase to find the president of the community (of about twenty people) to ask permission to camp on the shore, we did so anyway with authorisation from the vice-president. We weren’t sure what you needed to do to become president. It might simply have been automatic on reaching the age of thirty. Everyone we saw appeared to be teenagers or children.
No one in that village could believe we were considering going through the pongo either. What was so bad about this thing? We discovered now, past the point of no return, that a boat had gone through just three days earlier, had overturned and nine out of thirteen passengers drowned. We just hoped it had more to do with lack of lifejackets and a general inability to swim and not so much because there wasn’t one but several large, powerful whirlpools stretching the width of the pongo which would turn any boat over, even one specially designed for it. As it happened, our boat was totally unsuited to the job: too small, too narrow, too low at the front, too unstable with the roof, the two 40 cc engines we had would be more difficult to handle (one more powerful one would be better). We were also carrying too much weight and it was packed in all the wrong places. We spent two hours reorganising the boat to make it as safe as possible while chatting to the guy who lives closest to the pongo on the best way to enter and leave the pongo as he refused to come with us as a guide. We took the roof off (only a case of undoing about eight bolts), putting all our backpacks in the back by the engine, tying a rope along the centre of the boat from the bow to the stern (to hold onto), and working out where everyone would sit, and donning life jackets for the first time on the journey.
As you’ve probably realised by now, we made it through and I have several panicky photographs to prove it. I regained the colour back in my frightened cheeks about half an hour after the event and we celebrated in the next village with chicken and rice and mildly alcoholic chicha (maize corn juice fermented with human spit). Our brave profe and his right hand man turned right around and motored straight on back through the pongo and back home to Atalaya. It wasn’t until several months later that Ruben was able to make contact with him and know that he made it through safely. The village he dropped us off at was Ivochote and marked the end of the boat trip. From there we took a slow bus to Kiteni. The driver, it transpired, had a friend in every village along the way, all of whom he shared a beer with. And from Kiteni to Chuanquiri by truck that left at 2am. We clambered into the back and literally fell, rucksacks and all, onto the passengers already on board. I shared a space of half a metre squared with a thirteen year old girl who kicked a lot in her sleep. A large rock in the road blocked our path halfway and took the whole night to clear. The three hour truck ride took nine. In the morning, we had to cross the Rio Blanco. We waited half an hour for a truck driver coming from the opposite direction who bravely stripped to his underpants to wade through the extremely fast-flowing, pretty deep water to remove rocks that might have lodged themselves along the ford since the last time a truck crossed.
Chuanquiri marked the start of the walk. It had taken a week to get there and we were keen to set off. A narrow, muddy, steep and rocky but well-maintained trail led us through hundreds of hectares of coffee and cocoa plantations. The going was pretty tough, none of us were really prepared and we learned to triple the times that locals gave us to our next destination. In the end, what takes locals one and a half days to walk took us five and a half. We were following the trail up, from rain forest to cloud forest and in the rainy season and we might have been carrying more gear than most but still.
We weren’t the world’s most explored explorers or anything. Our little group was made up of Ruben, future guide of this route, the only Peruvian but the biggest tourist; Richie, vegan-bodybuilder-tattooed-pierced-philosopher from the States who survived the walk chewing coca leaves; Barry a military trained action man computer engineer from Windsor who, guaranteed would not like anything on the basic menu in any restaurant; and me.
We camped at night in the gardens of the overwhelmingly friendly locals, sharing with us their grapefruits, yuca, papas, coca leaves and papaya, and allowed us to pitch our tents amongst their precious chicken houses, pig pens, and sometimes inside them, anything they could think of to keep us fed, warm and dry. We bought some delicious granadillas (a bit like a mild, sweet passion fruit) from a man who walked a couple of kilometres through his smallholding to fetch them. In Ututo, we arrived exhausted and bedraggled at lunchtime after a particularly wet night and a three hour walk through a muddy and boggy but beautiful cloud forest fairyland. While the husband of this two person village went off to fix the footpath further along our journey, his wife invited us into her kitchen to dry our shoes and toast our socks over the open fire while she made corn soup and wandered around shouting at the chickens in quechua.
The final day was the longest and hardest. We had been climbing steadily upwards since the rainforest start 5 days before and had finally got to an altitude that started to affect our breathing. It was a beautiful but permanently rainy area and, already wet, we started to freeze as we approached a valley with snowy mountains flanking both sides of it. Towards the end of the day, when we’d nearly made it to Vilcabamba, our destination, a couple of drunken mule-herders chatted to us enthusiastically for a while about anything they could think of while they shared their much appreciated aguardiente, coca leaves and cigarettes.
And that was it, from Vilcabamba (had we made it to the lost city of the incas?), we walked the final stretch to Huancacalle and caught a bus to Quillabamba, Cusco and civilisation. Everything, our rucksacks, shoes, ourselves arrived at the youth hostel muddy, smelly and over the next couple of days we slowly returned to clean beings once again, the blisters on my fingers testament to how much I scrubbed clean everything I owned in the hostel’s outside sink. Probably the most memorable, fun and exciting trip so far. Looking back, I think the boat ride through the Pongo de Mainique was my closest brush with death, although some of the rickety bridges we crossed on that trail, most no more than a tree trunk slung across a raging torrent, made me happy to be alive. A guardian angel was certainly watching over us those two weeks.
We went on to do the four day Inca Trail to Machu Picchu a couple of days later but that’s another story. I got the tour guiding job so looks like I’ll be staying here in Peru. The contract is for a year so, all being well, I’ll be here at least that long.
