Michael Palin ventures to southern Peru and (with film crew in tow) braves the rapids, going from the terrified to the sublime
I don’t think I’ve ever felt more adventurous, more intrepid and more excrementally terrified than descending the rapids of the Urubamba River towards the Pongo de Manique, the last ravine of the Andes and the gateway to the Amazon. To get to it you have to go north beyond Machu Picchu and beyond the railhead at Quillabamba until you reach Kiteni, where the road ends.
My film crew and I took on the rapids in June, ostensibly the dry season. The night before, as we camped by the riverbank, I made the mistake of reading Peter Matthiessen’s account of negotiating the Pongo in his fine book The Cloud Forest. He had descended the Pongo in April and it had been a violent, at times terrifying, ordeal. I barely slept that night, worrying about the fine details of my will.
The morning was damp; the forest seemed heavy and oppressive as we pushed away from Kiteni. I was in a wooden canoe with an outboard and an exceedingly skilful pilot, but as we neared the Pongo the river seemed to suddenly head downhill.
Soon more than spray was sweeping across our boat. Waves hit head on and from the side as the canoe slewed round in the fierce current. Our pilot stared ahead, rapt in concentration as he tried to make some sense of it all.
Between duckings I became gradually aware of the mist ahead swirling around massive black rocks, on which at times we seemed bound to dash ourselves, only to twist and scud away at the very last minute. With a deft flourish our man smacked over one wave, twisted past a second, smacked head-on through the next two and suddenly the tumultuous din was silenced and we were swallowed up by the gorge.
Our reward for surviving this chaos was to enter an oasis of sublime tranquillity. Glistening streams of water slid silently down the black basalt cliffs that rose around us, steep but not forbidding. The rock surfaces were weirdly and wonderfully irregular. Every shape and every angle seemed ingeniously sculpted. The forest swung low towards us, great swinging lianas, festooned with flowering vines. Black butterflies flitted about the banks and over everything hung this profound, seductive silence.
Everyone has their favourite Shangri-Las, but in all my journeys I had never experienced anything quite like it, or been anywhere as fantastic and at the same time utterly secure. In the Pongo de Manique, enclosed by nature at its most exotic, I felt I had reached the ultimate goal of the traveller. There was nowhere more wonderful to be.
Michael Palin, TV traveller extraordinaire
