 In
the Wake of TragedyWhile perhaps
more than half a dozen expeditions have kayaked the Cotahuasi, the data
for our trip was still pretty sketchy. Nobody had run the entire canyon
since the fall of 1998. The last expedition to set out down the river,
three weeks before we arrived in Peru, had made it less than five miles
down the lower canyon before a combination of higher-than-expected
water, poor judgment and bad luck led to tragedy. A reporter from the
BBC had been lost when she was thrown from her raft above a series of
Class V drops. After extensive searches, her body was never found. We
were the first people to enter the canyon since the accident, and though
it wasn't our primary responsibility, sound river ethics demanded that
we keep a watchful eye out for any sign of the body.
The next morning paddling down the river, the thought of what lay below,
both in terms of the prospect of finding the woman's remains and the
whitewater that had killed her, cast a somber mood over a group which
to that point had taken everything in stride. After less than 45 minutes
of consistent, easy gradient, the character of the river changed
dramatically. It entered a sheer inner gorge and began pooling above
what appeared to be a significant rapid. We paddled to the side of the
river and scouted.
Below us lay a
jumble of house-sized boulders that disappeared around a bend in the
river. Still, the rapid did not seem too difficult. One by one, we
negotiated the boulder garden and assembled in a large eddy just before
the blind corner. From there, we got out and scouted again. Immediately, we realized we were in the middle of the rapid that had
been the scene of the accident three weeks earlier. Below us, most of
the river pushed down the right side of the canyon into a pile of large
rocks. To the right of the pile, the rocks closed off the channel,
creating a classic sieve, a place where the water passes through but a
boat or a person cannot. On the left side of the river, two steep,
narrow chutes created fairly straightforward lines for kayaks. The raft,
however, would have to run the heart of the rapid, passing just left of
the pile of rocks, taking care not to get pushed into the sieve.
Our group made it through the rapid without incident. In truth, the
rapid was barely a Class V drop. It is impossible to know for certain
what happened to cause a death in that place. Varying water conditions
and lackadaisical safety procedures may have played a role, but the
biggest factor was almost certainly just bizarre bad luck. River running
is not a particularly dangerous sport, but just like mountaineering,
the more unknowns that are pushed into the equation, the greater the
chance for an accident to occur. The more accidents that occur, the
greater the probability that one will be devastating. Paddling down, we
scanned intently for any signs of a body, but found nothing.
 We ate
lunch on a rocky beach a couple of miles further down the river where
the canyon opened back up. Above us lay the ruined foundations of an
Inca outpost, rough-hewn stones and bits of pottery clearly identifying
the previous presence of people. The Canyon of the Cotahuasi had been
first settled by pre-Inca peoples more than a thousand years ago. In
the time of the Incas, the canyon became a key link between the
imperial palaces in Cuzco and the ocean. At the height of the Inca
Empire, numerous small settlements existed the length of the canyon.
Inca runners, carrying everything from fresh fish to marching orders,
traversed the canyon constantly. After the Inca Empire began to falter,
the canyon became less and less important. By the 20th century, life in
the canyon had reverted almost completely to small, isolated farming
settlements with little or no influence from the outside world. Still,
trails crisscross the canyon for its entire length. In some places, the
trails are numerous enough to create intricate, web-like
patterns among the rocks and shrubs of the canyon walls.
The remainder of first day of paddling was fantastic. The Cotahuasi is a
young canyon in geological time and changes perceptibly from year to
year. Rock falls, landslides or flooding can completely change the
nature of a river or a particular rapid. Every horizon line, every blind
corner could have meant a confrontation with an unrunnable sieve or a
river-wide ledge hole. Still, nothing was that difficult. Every rapid,
even the most heinous
looking, had a runnable line. The boating was read-and-run boogie water
at its finest. Look over your shoulder, spot the eddy, make the ferry.
Repeat. The gradient was the most consistent I had ever encountered. We
seemed to be literally charging towards the sea.
Our second day on the river turned out to be more exciting than any of
us had anticipated or really wanted it to be. The whitewater was only
marginally more difficult than the previous day’s, but for some reason
the river wanted a piece of us. When the day was over, the tally was
stout: three overturned kayak swimmers and a flipped raft. Still,
despite the carnage, everybody and all the gear made it safely through.
The next two days passed in a blissful cycle of whitewater days and
campfire nights. The only major incident we encountered was Marc's
run-in with some extraordinarily hot chilis that had an unfortunate
resemblance to red bell peppers. By the afternoon of our third day on
the river, we were emerging from the heart of the canyon. Once we
reached the confluence of the Cotahuasi and the Moran, the wind picked
up and the climate began to change dramatically. We arrived at the
confluence at about 1 p.m. According to Gian Marco, the takeout was not
more than three hours from the confluence and the water was basically
flat. As we sat eating lunch, a steady afternoon headwind blew up from
downstream. The appearance of this phenomenon and a hesitancy to end our
journey led to a decision to hang out at the confluence until the sun
set and paddle out to the take out under the moonlight when the wind
would hopefully cease.
We sat and slept and swam in the late afternoon light of the canyon. As
the sun angled downward and the shadows lengthened, the light took on
the opaque brightness of white gold bathing the two gigantic canyons
coming together to form a broad, deep alluvial road to the sea. The
salt-filled breeze and traces of fog telling of the ocean, and the cold,
clear water tumbling down from the Andean spine of the continent were
very soothing for our last evening on the river.
Late in the day the sun tipped over the edge of the southwestern wall of
the canyon and the breeze, as if by magic, ceased. We piled into our
river gear in the cooling evening and began our jaunt to the sea. After
about 10 minutes of paddling, we realized two very important things: The
moonlight was not as bright as we had hoped and the river was not at all
flat. In fact, the river, now twice as large, moved quickly through
several Class II and III rapids. As the night deepened, our jaunt
became more of a game of dodge ball, trying blindly to avoid the random
boulder or crashing wave hole.
After about an
hour, we came to a perfectly flat sandy beach, below which lay a rapid
of indeterminate length and steepness. Without much dissension, the
group decided we'd had enough of night paddling and would camp on the
beach. In the morning, we’d paddle out the remaining couple hours of the
trip. We set up a makeshift camp and crawled into our sleeping bags only
to be awakened about an hour later by the loud report of fireworks.
A
Party at the Edge of the World
One thing we
never expected to encounter in Cotahuasi Canyon was a party. The Cotahuasi is in one of the most remote areas of the world. The small and
isolated communities that do exist are basically bronze-age remnants,
living much as they did when Catholicism was first introduced by the
invading Spaniards. But celebrating is a universal human trait – all
that’s usually needed is some sort of event and a healthy dose of
intoxicants. In this case, the event was a local saint's day and the
intoxicant was the
local wine harvest.
After the fireworks died down, we slept. We awoke to a procession of
children, ranging from toddlers to teenagers, coming out a dense
morning fog across the beach towards us. They surrounded us curiously.
They had come to issue an invitation. The fiesta that had begun last
night was to last three days. We were exhorted to come up and try some
of the local vintage of wine and join the party.
The village that
lay above the beach was surrounded by grape vines. Literally overnight,
we had gone from a desert to a maritime climate. Thick fog hung low in
the early morning sky, while the bright sun beyond worked to heat it
away. After sampling the local brew and making an obligatory tour of the
church, we happily staggered back down towards the beach, waving
goodbye. By the time we reached the beach, the sun had finally dispelled
the fog. We quickly packed and pushed off. In the light of day, the
rapids below were only riffles. By mid-afternoon we reached our
take-out and by nightfall, we were hurtling along the Pan-American
highway towards Arequipa.
Back in Arequipa, the rest of the world continued to march on. The day
of our return saw a massive demonstration by Arequipan citizens and
students against the dubious re-election of then incumbent President
Alberto Fujimori. Emerging from a landscape of tectonic and cyclical
movements, a landscape without artifice or contrivance, back into a
world of very real geopolitical strife, left us all stunned. We
wandered through the demonstrations aimlessly. All the simplicity and
clarity of our time in the canyon seemed to dissolve in the face of the
mind-numbing complexity of the conflict we were witnessing.
Demonstrators in
southwestern Peru were protesting a government in Lima that was
operating in an information-driven global economic and political web
that touched every corner of the earth and changed almost
instantaneously. And what were we? Eight individuals playing an
infinitesimally small part in the whole drama who had just happened to
plan a trip down a river during Peruvian election season.
To me, this is the heart of the modern expedition. Even in places as
remote as the Cotahuasi, the exigencies of humanity’s quotidian lives
push further into the "wild" places of the planet. We cannot separate
ourselves from what we see going on around us. We cannot expect things
to be a certain way just because we imagined them to be so.
Dunkin' Donuts do
exist in Peru, there is wine being grown in the deepest gorge in the
world, and even in the most idyllic natural paradises, the struggles of
people and their governments do not disappear. “Getting away from it
all” is no longer a useful metaphor
for adventure travel. And perhaps that is the point. Whether what we are
experiencing is the sensation of being literally disgorged from the
river to the sea, or being swept along a boulevard by 1,000 angry
Arequipans chanting "Death to tyrants!," we are participants, not
observers, in the events of our lives.
For
more information on traveling to Peru and paddling the Cotahuasi River,
please contact Bio Bio Expeditions.
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