News Bulletins
The Completion of the 'Where's Manchester Expedition'
27/10/08
Jungle life
Of course, getting to this exhausted state on the side of a hill below Manchester had started a long time ago. Two months prior to reaching this hill we’d launched our canoe onto the Manuripi. In actual fact we hadn’t launched it at all. A bunch of excited villagers in San Silvestre had taken over getting the canoe into the water. They had literally clambered all over it and each other to take it for a spin before we could wrestle it off them, throw three months worth of food, kit and ourselves into it and paddle off around the first bend and into the Amazon.
The feeling of actually sitting in our little blue canoe and feeling the first few moments of the brown waters coursing under the boat as our paddles cut into the water for the first time was something neither of us will ever forget. Months and months of planning, fumbling around in the dark learning all that we needed to know to make this trip a success was now behind us. Liz had spent night after night working out calorific values, weights and volumes of food. I’d had to learn about solar power, modified sine waves and back-up protocols. Just living in the jungle was the easy bit. But that feeling of being on the water, in the Amazon, in the middle of nowhere. It was a heady mix of elation, disbelief that we’d actually got here and an edge of fear. We had no idea of what was before us. Not a clue. And that was the stuff of adventures, which in part was why we were here. For the first few miles we didn’t talk much at all. I remember asking Liz to ‘put a bit more effort in’ because I couldn’t tell if she was making any difference to the forward momentum of the canoe or not. She asked if she could have a rest and I wondered how we were ever going to canoe over 800 miles because I was as tired as she was and we’d only paddled 500 metres. But when we did start to talk the floodgates opened. “Bloody hell, we’ve done it you know; we’re floating down the Manuripi, looking for Manchester. We’re here. We’re doing it. Bloody hell, we’re doing it”. I couldn’t believe that this moment had come and judging by the giggles coming from the front of the canoe, neither could Liz.
“This is unbelievable. I just can’t believe it. We’ve done it. Did you see the faces of those guys back at San Silvestre? They couldn’t believe what we were doing you know!”
I did know. It was only because they couldn’t believe we were actually doing this and that they wanted a play in our canoe that we’d managed to distract the Reserve Guards enough to get on the water and away before they remembered we hadn’t shown them the permits we were supposed to have but didn’t. Sometimes it pays to speak appalling Spanish because it’s a great way of confusing and distracting people from what they want to know. By the time they’ve worked out what you said, you’ve gone. It’s served us well at many border crossings and it served us well now. Confuse, distract and evade. “I thought we were going to have problems with the toothless old boy,” I said. “I still can’t believe we got away with that. He really thought for a moment that our travel insurance was our permit.”
“It was a bit of a close call wasn’t it? I was beginning to wonder how much we were going to have to bribe him.” Liz replied with an edge of mischief in her voice.
“I recon he’d have settled for a fiver if we’d done it behind closed doors you know.”
“Possibly.” And on the conversation went for the next hour or two until one of us decided we wanted a coffee and we tried to get onto the bank. Although this was the dry season, the water was still quite high and we just rammed the canoe up the bank with a few hefty paddle strokes and Liz tested its firmness, noticing how the canoe had sliced through the bank as opposed to up it. This was the first taster of what the next two and a half months would have in store for us. Nine times out of ten getting from the canoe to firm ground meant crossing, or often scaling a cliff of hissing, stinking and farting mud. By the time we found firm ground we would both be covered in clinging red clay upto our knees and beyond. It would weigh us down, exhaust us and sometimes even come between us. For the first month it became a bone of contention between us. It was always the same. If we wanted to get out of the canoe it meant getting covered in mud, it was a fact. It was always the same and it was inevitable. As I held onto a tree root or kept paddling the front of the canoe into the bank to stop us from drifting downstream Liz, finding her feet both metaphorically and physically, would dance about in the front, prodding the mud with her paddle in the forlorn hope of finding a firm bit. There never was a firm bit and the minutes would tick by with me gradually seething more and more until I’d let rip with a torrent of e’ffing and blinding. “For $%&$£ sake, just get out of the &$£&% boat. Its %&$%$£ muddy, its always &%$£&% muddy.”
“Oh, $%£@ off” she’d reply and consequently many a coffee was made in silence. I was impatient and Liz was doing her best but it didn’t feel like that at the time. As the weeks passed by Liz was transformed into a leaping conqueror staking a claim on every bank she found and I’d marvel at her sprightly step and confidence. However, it wasn’t like that at our first coffee stop. Or the next few hundred for that matter. This first coffee stop, a few miles outside San Silvestre had me counting my blessings that the villagers couldn’t see us now. As we’d paddled off around the first bend with the villagers looking on I’d whispered to Liz, not entirely joking, “Look good Love. We’ve only got to make it round this bend and then we can fall in!” We did make it round that first bend without falling in and our pride (my pride) remained in tact. But now we’d reduced ourselves to a panting, sweating heap of mud covered beached fish. The ambition of making a simple cup of coffee had transformed us, the canoe and everything in it into a coagulated lump of steaming jungle mud. Even the fire was covered in mud and to this day I have no idea how we ever nursed a flame from that damp pile of twigs. So many coffee stops were going to be like this and indeed they were but it just made our hot drink into something far more than a mix of unfiltered river water mixed with cheap coffee granules and powdered baby milk. It turned it into liquid gold and while the mud tried to drive us insane the coffee always kept us within reach of an acceptable degree of sanity; generally speaking. With the first sip our frustrations with each other and the Amazon would evaporate and as long as we didn’t move around too much we were in paradise.
The coffee stop challenge was at least a twice-daily ritual, but luckily establishing a camp for the night was something we only had to do one a day. Its amazing how bloody hard it is to find a couple of trees in the jungle that are at just the right distance apart so that a hammock can be slung between them for the night. Once Liz had finished her Manuripi mud dance and ventured up the bank into the jungle there would be long periods of silence interspersed with the whistling fall of a machete cutting through a vine or the ringing thud as it glance off a tropical hard wood. If we were lucky we’d be able to find a few trees that would suit our purposes on the first recce. If we weren’t so lucky we would have to move on down the river and look for another spot where we could a) get out of the canoe and b) had trees that met our criteria. Where the trees strong enough? Where they small enough to tie a 5 metre rope around? Were they free of ants? Did they drop acid laden sap that would burn us in the night? Was the ground firm enough? Would anything fall on us? If the answers to that little lot was yes, yes, yes, yes, no, no, yes, no (said quickly it sounded like a porn film) we could camp there.
We didn’t always get it right and the second night on the river was to be the first misjudged location, or at least the first misjudged event. Still as silly as school girls having seen our first river otters, (a group of five that barked at us, challenging us to a fight before fleeing), we decided to look for a spot to camp straight away in the hope that they might come back down the river. Within minutes we found a narrow stream with deep sides that joined the main river. There were otter and tapir tracks everywhere. The tapirs had left neat piles of dung and the otters had left ugly piles of fish bits around and as a consequence it smelt a little but it was a small sacrifice for the privilege of seeing giant Amazonian otters in the wild. The available ground for the camp was a narrow strip that ran along the edge of the stream at forty-five degrees to the main river. There was a scrambling climb of eight feet or so up a twisted collection of tree roots onto firm ground that sloped back to the river. Aside from the ants and the smell it wasn’t a bad spot but it was narrow. To get both hammocks up would mean hanging one of them from the same tree that we had been using to get up from the river. As a consequence someone would be sleeping over the water. That someone was me.
At this stage of the trip - day 2, it was exciting and a novelty to cook over an open fire with streaming eyes from hanging clouds of smoke and to then chip the burnt offerings off the bottom of the pan. It would be several hours between first deciding we were hungry, finding something in the jungle to burn and actually eating that nights choice of culinary delight. However, we’d been canny enough to allocate a sizable portion of the valuable space in the canoe to a number of bottles of rum and several dozen limes. There were a number of nights there after that had us waking up in our hammocks without ever remembering how we got to bed. It could be argued that I had had one or two double rums too many but I don’t believe that was the case. After a sumptuous meal of 3-minute noodles and cuppa soup followed by treacle sponge and custard I tucked Liz into bed to the sound of tree frogs and cavorting caiman all around us. It was a bit of an art to get into our hammocks without clouds of mosquitoes following us in but we had practiced for many nights on Cannock Chase, as several startled dog walkers will testify too. This particular evening required a modified approach to my hammock entry however. It hung, tantalizingly before me a few feet beyond where the bank began to fall away to the river. As such, when I stood three feet away from it it was at a comfortable waist height but if I stood up against it that short descent down the bank would have the hammock hanging at neck height. The modification to my entry style was to be a quick reaching hop combined with a half pirouette, which would see my bum firmly nestled in the welcoming nylon. From there I could swiftly tuck my head under the mosquito net and swing my legs in. Finally I would reach for the two-way zip and close myself in for the night. It was such a simple and effective approach that it didn’t require a great deal of thinking about. It just required to be done.
Stage one, the launch and pirouette, were completed in the blink of an eye and the hammock cradled me like a loving mother, rocking me gently from side to side with my feet dangling in mid air. Stage two, the leg swing and recline was a disaster. I know where I went wrong now though. It was a simple case of mistiming. I should have waited for the rocking of the hammock to reach its zenith on the bank side motion before swinging my legs up. This I didn’t do and with incredible and alarming speed the hammock inverted and I found myself hanging over the river, face down, held in place by the equivalent of my mothers hair net. Liz later said I looked like a skydiver in suspended animation. It now occurred to me that there were a great deal of nocturnal and carnivorous animals in the river. I hung there contemplating my predicament when a seemingly distant voice asked, “Are you all right?”
I could immediately think of several answers but chose “I could probably do with a hand!” I heard Liz’s hammock zip sliding open, the sound of shuffling feet through leaves and the belly laugh of someone without a shred of sympathy. It took some time for Liz to compose herself enough to actually help me and during those long moments I willed her to slide down the bank on her arse into the mud as retribution for her attitude.
We stayed another two nights at that camp spot and I always went to bed before Liz following that particular incident. It wasn’t to be my last hammock misadventure during our time in the woods but I never strung a hammock over the water again. I’m pleased to say that Liz had one or two hammock misadventures herself. There was the particularly entertaining occasion when a troop of red howler monkeys took offence to Liz hanging from their tree in her hammock and covered her in an unrelenting shower of faeces and urine for several minutes. As we made our way along the river, looking for Manchester there seemed to be something for one of us to laugh about at the others expense almost every day. Often several times a day.
After seven weeks of paddling along a river that doubled back on itself so often we spent as much time going west as we did east, we were in the general ball park of where we believed Manchester to be and the real hunt began. Manchester decided not to give herself up too easily though and we would begin every day believing that this was the day we would find the settlement but ended the day with it still just being to the two of us. The aviation maps we had with us didn’t show Manchester and all we had to go on were a few historical references, the book ‘A World of Manchesters’ by Roy Cookson and a confusing conversation with Don Willie at San Antonio. This wasn’t much information to go on at all. It was compounded by the fact that the river had changed its course since the time that Manchester was first founded. The village hadn’t moved, the lagoon that we understood it to be on the banks of hadn’t moved but the entrance to the lagoon had. We spent days paddling up blind allies, cutting our way overland through the forest looking for clues or some high ground and found nothing. We knew there was something somewhere but the question was where? The short answer is that it wasn’t where we thought it was. It was over fifteen miles away from where we first started looking, and fifteen miles in the jungle is worth a hundred miles anywhere else. Every metre gained had to be fought for. The heat attacks the senses, insects attack the body, plants grab, pull and tear skin and clothes alike. We spent days fighting with the jungle to make any headway and we didn’t always win. After numerous forays away from the river to look for clues and finding none we were left with no option but to carry on paddling downstream and hope we hadn’t missed the place.
Liz ventured one evening over a bowl of curried piranha soup “You do realise we’ll never live it down if we don’t find this place don’t you!” The statement made it sound like it was my fault but that wasn’t the way it was meant.
I chuckled nervously. It was something I’d begun to consider myself. “ If we can’t find it I’m going to stay here on the river and settle down with a harem of native girls and live out my days as a demigod.”
Liz threw a half eaten chapatti at me. “Charming. Anyway, you should be so lucky!”
“You can be Number 1 wife darling!” It’d been a long day and some distraction was needed I thought. That is until the rest of the chapatti hit me square on the forehead. “You can be Number 5 wife now.”
“Be serious.” She tried to say without laughing.
“We’ll find it. It’s just a question of when and how. Don Willie confirmed the place still existed and it was on the shores of a lagoon, and it’s on the north side of the river. We’ve seen nothing that looks like the entrance to a lagoon anywhere so we can’t have gone past it. It can only be downstream can’t it.” I tried to sound more confident than I was but I was trying to convince myself as much as Liz.
“I know, but we expected to reach the place a week ago and we’re well past where we thought it was now aren’t we.”
“Well, yes but there just hasn’t been anything even remotely matching the description of where it is. If the worst happens we’ll miss the place and end up in Puerto Rico or some other village. If that happens we’ll take the canoe apart, hire a boat with an engine and come back up the river with a guide. It’s not the best scenario but at least we could re-supply.” The best of the food had been eaten weeks ago and we were both getting tired of fish soup, not to mention baked fish, spit roasted fish, poached fish and fish surprise – which was just rice soup on the days when we didn’t catch any fish.
“I suppose so. I’d love a bottle of wine with this, I know that much!” Aside from the wine there was no other answer to the mystery. We had to carry on downstream and hope. So that’s what we did. We lent on our paddles and set off down the river again.
The days passed by and there was nothing but high banks, flat landscapes and a billion trees all around us. Oxbow lakes confused us, splitting the river and giving us the dilemma of left or right only to find ourselves back on the main watercourse fifteen minutes later having paddled in a bloody big circle. On one hand the blind allies frustrated us but they were also indescribably beautiful. Victoria lily pads, six feet across parted as the canoe nosed its way through. Yellow flowering water hyacinth floated in the margins and jabairu storks, crested egrets and blue and red macaws lifted into the sky as we came through. 300 pound fish with scales the size of 50 pence pieces breached beside us and grumpy caiman belly-flopped off the banks. In places like these we’d spend more time juggling cameras than paddling. But we were still searching for Manchester amongst it all.
Back on the main river we drifted past yet another opening off the river to our right and thought better of it so we paddled the hundred metres or so back upstream to investigate. Our old maps said that Manchester was on the northern side of the river but we already knew they weren’t accurate. The mouth of the channel was choked with more water hyacinth and a fallen tree part way across. We squeezed passed and the slit-laden waters of the Manuripi turned to a clear tannin at the confluence. We took the opportunity to fill our water bottles with something we could just about see through. Our water purifier had packed up on day three and ever since we’d been drinking the river water filtered though a silk bag.
The channel opened out into the width of the main river and we were obviously on an old line again but, as ever, the wildlife tempted us further in. The area had a sleepy feel about it. Turtles lazed on fallen logs, otters barked at us and snakes hung with the vines. A stiff breeze cooled the air down to a slightly more comfortable 35 degrees. Fifteen minutes of bending into the wind had us at another part sealed junction where the river had come through once in a past life. But we should have been at a dead-end and we weren’t. We were at another fork. A channel continued off to the left again, disappearing tantalisingly round a bend. Things didn’t seem right but we dared to hope. We’d come south off the river, not north. The land was still flat, not hilly and the entranceway to where we were was too narrow for boats of any size to come through. Everything seemed wrong but something seemed to say it was right anyway. Liz looked over her shoulder at me and gave a little smile. The smile said “My heart’s going ten-to-the-dozen!” Mine was too.
We paddled round the bend and just saw more of the same; jungle and water. We pressed on, accompanied by noisy kingfishers who screamed their annoyance at us. It seemed to be just another blind ally after all and our hearts sank again. “What’d you think. Keep going or get back to the river? We’ve come a couple of kilometres”. I asked putting my paddle across my lap. The canoe immediately caught the wind and began to drift back the way we’d come.
“This way might take us back to the river anyway so lets keep going eh.” Despite her suggestion Liz had put her paddle across her lap too and sat in the front having a sip of her tepid water and taking in the view. It was a beautiful place. There was no mistaking that.
Knowing that every metre we drifted backwards we were going to have to make up again I reluctantly put my paddle back into the water wiped a stray bead of sweat from my eye. “You get the video camera out then. We might as well get some of this on tape”. I suggested.
“Sounds good to me. Can you manage in this wind?”
“I’ll let you know.” And off we set once again, disappointed but at least appreciating where we were. After two months it was still special. We made slow progress with just me paddling but we edged along and the landscape continued to reveal itself. Jungle to our left and savannah to the right, where a fire had come through and grasses had taken over. Birds circled over the savannah while a distant troop of monkeys advertised themselves with guttural calls to each other in the trees. The waterway swept to the right and then back to the left and then began to open out into a wider section. A wider section! The forest to our left began to rise up onto a hill and………
“Chris. I can see a hut! I can see a bloody hut. You don’t think……..,” along pause, “…….. do you?”
“It could be” said with a very exaggerated “Beeeeee!” “It might not be too. But it could be!” Our necks extended to approximately six feet as we craned to see more. And we did see more. Amongst the trees more huts began to reveal themselves in a line on the brow of the hill. And three or four boats wallowed on the bank. Could this be it? Liz continued to film what we were seeing and I did my best to paddle the canoe towards the other boats as quickly as I could, which wasn’t very fast. I was finding it hard to almost stand up in the canoe, paddle and breath at the same time. The wind blew, our hearts pounded again and our mouths went dry. And then the canoe scraped its way up onto the bank. Before us a great grassy hill disappeared into the sky, pigs wallowed in a mud hole beside a hut at the waters edge and someone looked back at us from a bus shelter in the middle of nowhere.
“This has got to be it!” Liz said almost giggling with nervous excitement. “What are we going to say?” We’d been looking for this place, which we thought as Manchester but still weren’t sure, for two months and Liz now wanted to know ‘what we were going to say?’.
“Well I’m going to ask if they’ve got a shop. I’d love a beer, not to mention something to eat that doesn’t taste of bloody fish.”
“God, just think! Come on.” And we hopped from the canoe and set foot on the sandy bank amongst the pigs, dragging the canoe onto firmer ground behind us. It’d floated off once before and it was a sod to get it back. The pigs scuttled away from us in a fit of squeals and grunts as we approached the first hut. Leaning beside an outhouse was a broken sign. ‘Bienvenidos Barraca Manchester’. Welcome to the area of Manchester. If it hadn’t have been for the pig shit we’d have kissed the ground. We hugged self-consciously knowing we were being watched and set off up the hill.
I boldly stepped forward and offered my hand to the young man like a modern day Livingstone “Hola, I’m Chris and this is my wife Liz. We’ve come here from Manchester”
“Hola, welcome. I’m Ivan. We’ve been waiting for you. We thought you’d have got here a few days ago. You’d like some grapefruit juice, yes?”
“I’d like a beer but grapefruit will do.” And we stepped though the turnstile into Manchester after sixty-four days of canoeing down a river in the middle of nowhere.