Last night I returned from an adventurous three and a half days deep into the Chiquibul forest. This included the worst night of sleep in my life and the most fun I have had on a kayak.
On Monday we descended from Mountain Pine Ridge to the Chalillo dam reservoir to camp at the water’s edge. The accompanying park rangers arrived early the next morning. We loaded up the kayaks and began a half-day’s journey up the reservoir that eventually snakes up the lower Raspaculo Branch of the Macal River. Near the confluence of the Monkeytail Branch we finally exited the reservoir and were into crystal clear flowing waters coming out of the headwaters of the Maya Mountains.
We journeyed for another beautiful day and a half upstream through riparian floodplains with a thick wall of vines and bri-bri and towering quamwoods behind them, surrounded by steep limestone hills and slopes blanketed with an imposing wall of green. The diversity of kingfishers was on display as green, pygmy, Amazon, and ringed kingfishers darted by chattering as we passed. An occasional splash would jolt the senses as another iguana belly flopped into the water, sometimes just feet from your kayak.
We continued up, paddling through long stretches of calm water until reaching a rapid and then jumping out and dragging our kayaks over the rocks, trying our best, although not always successfully, at keeping our footing and staying upright. That is extremely exhausting work. All along the way we observed bright and raucous groups of macaws in trees or flying overhead either going to or returning from foraging areas. Over those two days, we paddled and dragged our canoes 23 miles until we found that we had overshot our destination, Cushtabani Camp. After that little discovery we struggled another 500 meters or so upstream until we found what seemed to be a suitable campground. It’s amazing how fatigue will allow you to make some really poor decisions.
Not long after wolfing down dinner we all retired before nightfall. After laying there for awhile I began to itch, a bit then a little more. Then the biting started. Before long I was getting munched…bad. Faster than I could move my hands then onslaught worsened. I turned on my headlamp to discover than I was covered by these tiny biting flies called no-see-ums. There was a swarm in my tent hammock. How they were able to get in I have no idea…there must have been a small opening in the Velcro entry. After a miserable hour I was able to get the situation under control. The rain has been really coming down at this point. That’s when I hear Glenn, one of the rangers yell, ‘We have to move! The river’s coming up.’ We quickly abandoned our hammocks and donned the ‘dry clothes’ readily at hand (this is important as you carefully keep one set of clothes aside to wear in the evening and to sleep; your day clothes stay wet the whole trip usually). In the pouring rain we packed up our hammocks and lugged up our gear and boats up the nearest hillside, slashing an opening with our machetes. This is about midnight mind you, in the rain. Each time we returned to get another bag, the water had risen that much more. One the last trip I was no longer walking on land but wading through water before ascending the hill. The boats had to be moved up once more as the river continued to rise. It probably went up six to eight feet that night. I settled into another round of bug munching and then managed an hour of sleep before thankfully seeing the sun rise.
I rose to find the river that had once been clear, calm and beautiful was now a muddy torrent, intimidating and menacing. The original plan of further exploration up the river was gone. There was no way to move upstream in that current. Now how safe was it to kayak down? What could we expect? Fallen logs in our path…killer strainers? We waited for a couple of hours for the river to go down a little, a very little and then decided to begin our trip back out. We loaded up and went down the first chute. The lead kayaker and I made it, and then the first ranger went down and took a log right to the chest, knocking him off. We recovered his paddle and kayak and he was able to hold onto another ranger’s kayak. This shook him up but we continued. He and another ranger were knocked off the next two rapids. We decided to stop for a couple of hours to let the river drop another eight inches. After this we continued down, rapid after rapid. The rangers were getting used to the paddling and balance and only one other big rapid gave us trouble; all (including me) but one person flipped after hitting pretty deep hole. I was lucky in that everything was next to me and it was an easy recovery. After that the rapids were fairly tame or we were getting better, no more spills.
We made the reservoir and paddled hard to the confluence of the Raspaculo and Macal Rivers. Here we had a nice camp site and a fresh spring with excellent drinking water. After another exhausting day, we retired early without the worries of flies or floods. What an excellent night’s sleep. The following morning we had all day to kayak only a few miles to the pickup point. Dr. Ed Boles, a freshwater ecologist from Galen University in Belize, and me hung back and observed a lot of really neat scarlet macaw behavior, male-male competition. They would dangle from the ends of branches and spread their long wings completely out. Then using one foot and beaks, they would kick and snap at each other until losing hold and dropping for a distance before recovering and flying back up into the trees. Afterwards, we slowly made our way back, discussing this and that. A nice finish to another adventure…
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