Day Three: Raft Building

23rd September 2010

Early in the morning all the rafters met en masse at the town plaza to load orselves onto a fleet of busses that would take us up the river to Porvenier where we would take a boat to Isla de Pescadores to build our rafts and begin the race. After a couple of hours of riding the bus we stopped at the town of Nauta where we were treated to a procession, drmming, and speeches from the local councillors, given good luck bracelets (mine made from red and black seed pods from the jungle and anaconda vertebrae) and provided lunch of rice, chicken, salad and juice in the hall. It was unbelievably hot and humid but terribly exciting to be given such a great reception by the local people there.

To get across to Isla de Pescadores we were loaded into the belly of a huge industrial type cargo boat (very exciting) to cross the river to the isolated sandy beach, where many piles of logs waited. A lottery was drawn for the piles of logs. We were rather unlucky in drawing a pile of 8 rather bent and skinny balsa logs, but soon got to work shaping the ends with machete, axe and chainsaw and lashing them together using steel cable that we had purchased earlier in Iquitos. As international entrants, we were permitted the help of locals. Unfortunately our local "helpers" turned out to be rather inexperienced, but enthusiastic nonetheless and got carried away with our vessel, causing some amount of friction between our team as we all felt rather frustrated with the design and style with which it was taking shape. Still we made the best of it, and nailed on four plastic garden chairs with the legs sawed off, upon which we would place foam pads for the comfort of our behinds, and an awning of army camo netting to shade us from the sun. Pink dolphins eyed us curiously from the waters edge, and we saw the most amazing and memorable golden syrup sunset. We worked until the sky was dark and we were eaten raw by vicious mosquitos, and I cut the name of our raft "Josephine" into the front log, with the image of a dolphin carved above, for good luck. Josephine was Beths mother who sadly passed away from breast cancer some years ago, and the reason we were all there together. Finally we fixed a ginormous union jack flag to the back of one of the masts, accompanied by our 2Action4Cancer" flag (black with 2 big pink feet) next to it ont he other back mast. It looked pretty darn fine, and we celebrated by eating our dinner of rice and chicken and hot spiced apple juice seated upon the craft.

The atmosphere of the camp was marvellous. I felt like I was living the pages of an episode of national geographic magazine, a shot somewhere between some bedouin encampment or refugee caravan, with awnings and tents spread across the back, people scattered about among campfires, logs and machetes cast about the place, the air hanging hot, thick and smoky. Wandering out behind the line of tents and tarp awnings to go to the toilet was interesting because there was so very little in the way of bushes or foliage to shelter behind!! Far behind the stretch of sand the jungle loomed both enticingly and also threateningly. I didn't even make it fully onto my camp mattress and slept on my back, fully clothed, hot and clammy, head leaning back on my back pack, and out like a light, covered in mosquito repellent hoping I would not be bitten any more in my sleep.