Trans-Amazon Expedition

Week One

After much hassling with customs, we finally saw that canoes had survived their 4,000 mile journey by truck, train, and ship. Let’s hope they make it another 3,000 miles on the river.

When the large truck carrying our canoes rolled into the ground transportation terminal in downtown Lima I was anxious to inspect them after their 4,000 mile journey by truck, train, and ship from Winona, Minnesota to Lima, Peru. We had spent the last 4 days getting our canoes through customs, which involved paying $1,800 in largely unexplainable fees, taxes, and bribes, and running all over Lima getting papers stamped, finger prints taken, and hiring a customs agent whose work ethic seemed shady at best. After the final $400 bribe was paid the canoes were released from customs, and were to be delivered by a ground transport company for their final 800 mile journey to Yurimaguas, Peru where our 3,000 mile canoe journey down the Amazon would theoretically begin. During this whole ordeal we had never actually been allowed to see our crate, and the only information we were able to glean from our customs agent was that one board had been broken during shipping.

My heart sank as the truck door opened. The crate had been completely destroyed. The 19 foot long crate, which had taken 3 people 14 hours to build, now consisted of two wooden walls held together by plastic that had originally been used to pad the canoes. Miraculously the canoes were unharmed. It turns out that when three really rough Royalex canoes are nested inside each other they become basically indestructible! Before placing the canoes in the crate at the Wenonah Canoe Company Factory we took the seats, thwarts, yokes, and end caps out of the 18 foot Champlain, and the 17 foot North Fork. Then we nested the North Fork inside the Champlain, and a 16 foot Adirondack inside the North Fork, which basically turned them into one really thick 18 foot canoe.

After some head scratching we decided to give away the two remaining walls of the demolished crate and ship the canoes to Yurimaguas wrapped in plastic. With the canoes once again out of our hands we were ready to begin the first stage of the Trans-Amazon Expedition, a 500 mile bike ride from Chicalyo, Peru up and over the Andes Mountains to Yurimaguas, the start of our 3,000 mile down-river canoe journey to the Mouth of the Amazon River.

Our 5 member team consists of experienced paddlers, but biking was somewhat new to most of us. Sure we had all ridden bikes as kids, but we all knew cycling over one of the largest mountain ranges in the world, while crossing a developing country, would be slightly different than a trip down to the neighborhood gas station for a slurpee.

Before for our paddles would touch the water of the Amazon, we needed to cross some massive mountains (at least when we were in the planning phase of the trip, bicycles seemed like the perfect way to traverse the Andes). No matter what happens in this phase of the journey, we can be somewhat confident that our canoes will be waiting for us, in one piece in Yurimaguas, ready for a journey to the sea.