ADVENTURES > Amazon (Continued)In the Bahamas the dangerous reefs and beautiful pink beaches of the coral islands, offered both haven and hazard - no different today than for Blackbeard and his pirates then. On the Caicos Bank one of the boats ran aground on a coral reef. On Crooked Island morsels of a caught Dorado where snatched up by sharks only a metre away. Huge Iguanas were their inquisitive companions in the Exumas and they nearly collided with some migrating whales off St. Lucia. The unpredictable weather played fair for the most and foul for some. Heading to Dominican Republic saw the boats spend a starry night becalmed on a perfectly flat sea and while crossing to Trinidad they experienced a concoction of sea and wind conditions never to be forgotten. Surfing down waves like rollercoaster's they reached Trinidad - a mere ninety-one days after having left Miami. The Amazon phase started in Venezuela at the delta of the Orinoco River only twenty miles from the southern tip of Trinidad. The quest here was to retrace the footsteps of Baron Alexander von Humbolt, who visited this region in 1800 to prove the existence of a natural link between the Amazon and Orinoco River systems. The Casiquiari Canal supposed by some, dismissed by others as a 'monstrous error in geography', lay deep in the rainforest some 1000 miles inland essentially a canal that joined the two river systems across a watershed! The boats tentatively entered the Orinoco Delta via the Cano Macero, the fresh water highway to the west. The solid walls of green on either side, a minefield of floating greenery and a four knot downstream current made sailing impossible. A contingency six-horse motor was deployed which slowly pulled both boats upstream, two hundred miles to the home of Angostura Bitters, Cuidad Bolivar. Here modifying the one boat with a permanent tent and each boat with an eight-horse motor, the team left for the Great Cataracts near Columbia. Even with alligators, freshwater dolphins, turtles and birds as company the sweltering days passed slowly into the timeless haze. |
