They Call It Rain Forest For a Reason.

The geography of South America is pretty simple; the continent only has three parts – the Amazon,  the Andes, the Rest. Alright, it might be a bit more complicated than that; the Rest is made up of the drier parts of Brazil, plus the Pampas in Argentina, plus Patagonia. Still pretty simple.

For Expedition65 we decided to essentially travel down the Andes from the top of South America to the bottom. We will, however, be zigzagging a little bit and drop officially into Amazonia a couple of times. Today we headed east from Baños in Ecuador across South America’s continental divide in the dramatic canyon along the Pastaza River which is one of 1100 tributaries that drain into the Amazon.

The weather was absolutely foul – heavy rain for several hours as we made our way south in the rain forest towards Cuenca. The rain went from acute to chronic but never stopped. All the rivers were in full flow bubbling over rocks and ripping sediment in a brown swirling soup.

All the rain that did not spend its energy on soaking us to the skin, shortly ended up in this river and will, about a month from now, spill out into the Atlantic Ocean, about 5,000 miles downstream.

The first person to make the same journey downstream was Francisco de Orellana in 1541. He set off in search for food for Pizarro’s marauding conquistadors but got mesmerized by the potential of what he saw and then, as they all did, took off in search of El Dorado which he thought was in the jungle. A few months later his party was attacked by an indigenous group that claimed a female god as their leader and he was convinced that they were being attacked by women. He later then named the river after the mythical women warriors of ancient Greece – the Amazons. After eight months he arrived at the Atlantic and became the first European to travel the length of the Amazon. Nobody else would manage to do this again for a hundred years.