Amazon 5000 Expedition Blog: 7-8-2012

 
7-8-2012:  It has been 18 days since we began to cross the Eastern Andes!  This has been some of the most brutal terrain I have ever experienced in my life, and trust me, I have done some very extreme things in my life but this takes the cake!  We have suffered through constant wetness, cold, injury, and sickness. We brought only enough food rations for a few days, as much as we could fit on our back, thinking we would live off the land, like the Indians, whose jungle is their home. Cutting, chopping, pulling and pushing through the cloud forest jungle from morning to night, we couldn’t see any sign, or footprint that can leads us to a food source. No wildlife, no game. No birds! So quite. Too quiet! No one wants to live here! Time and foot of man had not touched those mountains, seems as wildlife had not either. Gorges and summits all forested from bottoms to tops. We observed species and plants of all kind of shape and color that have never seen before to mankind. No risk on eating unknown planets is taken here. Conserving our law supply of food was hard on the people. The expedition had run out of food. We were forced to wander hungry through the jungle. Our hunting and fishing skills are useless here. If there are some wildlife here they all were hiding out from the same harsh elements that slapped our faces and bodies nonstop. My people couldn’t think of anything other than food and became irritable and paranoid. We all started losing weight rapidly and looked more like dead men than cheerful expedition as it was up to this point. We were now more susceptible to disease and illnesses of all kinds. Chills swept through our bodies as our last source of heat consumed by our last fire.

 
With the wet soaking environment we lived all these weeks, we exercised all survival skills and means available to us in order to build fire. No primitive fire can be built here. A year ago while running my reckoning for few days at the gateway to this mountains I left a small can of gasoline hanging on a tree, thinking I will have to carry a small Honda generator to charge my electronics. Now that I found it at the same place I left it, we carried it and used a small portion of this “gold liquid” to ignite fire each evening. But nothing could hold a fire there, not to cook ramen noodles soup nor to provide warmth in this wet coldness. Using my last resource idea I’ve asked all my team to donate their socks to the mission. One of the morning routines I insisted on, has been educating my team to cover their feet generously with Vaseline before wearing their boots. That practice proved to eliminate all foot problems due to long daily walks. These socks soaked daily with Vaseline were now very much valuable! Adding more Vaseline into the socks and igniting one sock a day, made our poor dinners possible! Locating the socks in a cavity between three horizontal tree logs we protected the fire from the wind and managed to boil water for all our needs. The Vaseline in the sox became the source of energy and burnt slowly and for long period. But that gasoline can we had will not last forever. We must move faster.    

  
I tried to find an “easier” route to cross this “green hell” as described by many jungle explorers before me. I fully identified myself now with the 1541 historic event over these mountains and of which footprints I was now following; the legendary Francisco de Orellana El-Dorado journey. My party is very small in comparison but all other “symptoms” exist here too. At each time we decided a path it ended up over precipices or at a deep gorge and forced us to turn around. My GPS unit screamed “EAST” and that is where I was going. But my indigenous team has lost trust in my satellite beacon as it didn’t show them HOW to cross these obstacles. Do I see devastation on the face of my people? The devices also couldn’t penetrate the thick canopy and signal out our location to civilization. Learning from the historic drama of this region I could smell the fear crawling their necks. I also had my own doubts. 

I could see the Sumaco volcano summit in a blink of a sun light that penetrated the clouds. That’s the direction I need to head now, South-east, as my team member, Norma, got very sick and she needed to be evacuated to a hospital.  She severely suffered from fever and other symptoms and needed a medical treatment.  She will not be able to continue and will probably not join us again. That is making us now short one person.  The rest of the team is now paying the price for losing one person; we have divided up her gear and are all now carrying even heavier backpacks. every pound we have to add makes it that much harder for us to move especially in this extreme terrain. I believe we are all now exceeding 50lb packs.  This is taking a toll on my people as well and adding to the suffering. We wrap up our injured and painful ankles tighter and we keep going. We are now slowly making our way down to the Orient; it is a much lower elevation to the east of Sumaco National Park. However don’t be fooled, we still have to cross hundreds of mountains of 700m each.  We still have to cross rivers, waterfalls and other dangerous obstacles.

For almost 3 weeks we haven’t seen the sun, we have been under clouds, with rain and even when we got a break from the rain, the canopy is so thick that the sun cannot penetrate.  The team and I are so happy to finally reach San Jose De Payamino!  It is a small indigenous town, where we were able to get some rice, plantains, and bananas.  We continued through the small town and made it to the Payamino River where we were able to finally catch some fish and get some good food in our bellies after barely eating for these last 3 weeks.  Here the canopy is not as thick and we have been able to finally get some sun and use our satellite communication devices.  It felt amazing to have each beam of the sun rays hit our skin, and to finally be able to soak in its warmth and nutrients.  That along with a full belly was absolutely priceless!  

We have arrived to a location that is too swampy for us to cross on foot. Thousands of acres of deep and muddy wetland accumulate down at the Oriente Rainforest by the nonstop water rushing down the Eastern Andes.  The mud is so deep, up past our waist, and the vegetation is so thick that there is no way for us to trek.  After defeating the harsh conditions of the Cloud forest we are too weak to take on this obstacle.  The likelihood of someone to get seriously injured or another team member became ill is greater than ever.  Building a raft seems to be the best solution to continue east on the river until we bypass this area into much drier land.  

Tomorrow we will begin the raft construction; we must find either a source of bamboo or several large balsa trees that can be built into a raft to carry six people along with all of our gear.  So far we have crossed approx 750 miles from the Pacific Ocean to our current location.  We have for the most part crossed Ecuador. all we have left is another 100 miles until we reach the border of Ecuador and Peru.  We will then begin to cross the dense Peruvian Jungle and will be officially in Amazonia - the Amazon Jungle.