I woke from my dream of raiding a cruise ship’s supply store to feel the faint patter of rain on my face. The nearby embers of our fire hissed and puffed as it duelled with the droplets. I looked over at the squirming forms of my travel companions, Robbie and Jasper, and cursed at them in their sleeping bags That’s the last time I listen to one of Robbie’s bright ideas. The Tuk Tuk Dispatches - Life on Three Wheels is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Let’s sleep under the stars. I plodded away from our fire and dragged my tent out of the tuk tuk. Once it was up I fumbled around with the zips and dragged my sorry looking mattress and sleeping bag inside. Despite the grit and damp, my exhaustion from climbing the largest sand dune in Peru the previous day meant I was asleep soon enough, and happily looting that cruise ship once again. The next morning I woke up with my face forming a sandy imprint on a wet pillow. Although this was a bad start to the day the answer to my problems was mere footsteps away. If I could just make it to the river, I’d be fine. I unzipped the door, found my flip flops and began my waddle to the brown river that snaked past our camp. Despite the fact we were camping in one of the driest places in the world, the Nazca desert, the banks of the river were brimming with fruit trees and life. These desert dwelling Peruvians had inherited the Inca’s knowledge of irrigation, funnelling the river off into nearby fields. The water transformed the surrounding desert into a green ribbon of bountiful farmland. I collapsed to my knees in the shallow flow and began scooping handfuls of water over my head. “Last night was lame as hell” Jasper was striding towards me, stripping off items of clothing as he walked. Upon reaching the river he stretched out his arms and landed face down in the water. “What’s the plan today then?” I asked his limp body as it floated past me. He flipped himself around and clasped his hands behind his mop of unruly blonde hair. “Tubing.” He shuffled over to a rock where he had stashed his valuables and picked up his phone. “You remember the sandy river we camped by just outside Ica?” He was pincering and thumbing his way north across the map to find the exact spot. “Well look what’s upstream of that.” He flicked his phone screen around to reveal what was clearly a canyon of sorts, with desert mountains on either side. The morning sun was already intense enough to make my skin tingle. Spending the majority of the day in a river sounded lovely. One of our team, Ivo, was bussing to Lima to meet up with a French girl he’d fallen for in the desert town of Huacachina, which meant there was just the four of us. Jasper, Robbie and I driving the tuk tuks and Matty Teng, an American motorcyclist we’d bonded with in Patagonia. After months of travelling together we’d given him the official position of “Tuk South Outrider.” After we’d dropped lover boy at the bus station, blasting out “Je ne regrette rien” through the speakers, we packed up camp and began our journey north along the Pan American highway. The Pan-American is a road that stretches from Alaska to the very southern tip of Chile. It’s one, continuous bit of tarmac with only a small break due to the mysterious bit of jungle between Colombia and Panama known as the Darien Gap. Although it may sound quite romantic, cruising North along the Pan American in a couple of Kenyan tuk tuks, I can assure you it’s not. If we drove for one hour without being driven off the road by a trucker, one of our tyres exploding or a gust of wind whisking our possessions into the desert, it was a good hour. With our shirts now soaked in sweat we finally pulled up to our old camp spot and tried to wrap our tired brains around the ordeal ahead of us. “It is 3 o’clock” said Robbie, holding three packs of cigarettes and inspecting our dry bags. “I’m gonna hedge our bets.” He finally decided, putting a pack of ciggies in each. I stuffed beers and rum into another dry bag whilst Matty Teng began pumping up tyre tubes. “God dammit.” Both of his motorcycle tubes were hissing at him. “I guess that means we’re all going down in tuk tuk tubes.” I said holding up the small ring that could be mistaken for one of those pregnancy pillows. “Hope there’s no rapids.” Grinned Rob. It was a good point. We had no idea what this river looked like and were about to blindly float down it. “Or waterfalls…” Matty Teng replied with a smirk curling beneath his impressive moustache. Sensing a safety debate on the horizon Jasper started the single cylinder engine to drown out any common sense and started to drive. By the time we reached our drop off point, above the canyon, it was four in the afternoon. We ran across a farmers recently ploughed field, leaving Wesley (passenger tuk tuk) under a mango tree. I couldn’t help noticing our shadows as we ran across the dusty earth. They were getting quite long. “How far away from camp are we Rob?” “About 14 Ks” “So we have to float 14 kilometres through a canyon with two hours of daylight?” “No” panted Rob, “That’s as the crow flies, we’ll be floating for longer than that.” With the scale of our odyssey beginning to dawn on us, we padded down the powdery white river bank and waded out into the water. It was deep enough to float in and flowing at a decent rate. That was lucky. Having done zero reconnaissance there was a chance we’d find just a muddy trickle. We each sat back onto our tuk tuk tubes and began our float downstream. Occasionally my foot would bump into the riverbed but thankfully it was all sand. No rocks or thorny tree branches yet. The sides of the river were covered in reeds and trees that were tangled in multi coloured scraps of plastic bags but, apart from the rubbish, it was lovely. The tubes weren’t big enough for our bodies to be floating but as long as they kept our heads above water, that was good enough for me. We were making good headway. Robbie grappled with his phone whilst shouting “Best guess for top speed.” 3, 4 and 5 Kilometres per hour, were the replies. “3.8… that’s not bad.” The sun was already low enough that it had dipped beneath the western bank and we floated in the shade. “Is that the start of the gorge?” I asked Jasper who was zipping along next to me drinking a Peruvian “Golden” cerveca . “I think so” The mountain I was pointing at was at least 5 kilometres away. I flashed a smile at him, thinking of every adventure we’d ever embarked on as Tuk South. All of the best ones had been poorly planned, worse executed and ended in us almost dying. Rob and I were still dealing with the effects of our camping expedition into the Amazon last November. Both of us becoming infected with a nasty little skin parasite known as Leishmaniasis. Granted, Rob had received the short end of the stick on that one — with twelve weeping pustules to my one. After a quick start to the mission the river widened and became more shallow. The four of us tried our best to bum shuffle across the sand but this was an undignified sight and we all gave up. We walked to where the river narrowed once again and the flow was strong. We were picking up speed. Rob shouted out new records as we barrelled towards the canyon. “7.2!” “8.5! Damn we are really motoring now.” I was at the front of our merry band when I could hear the unmistakable sound of rapids. I dug my feet into the sand and waited for everyone to catch up. “Rapids!” I shouted over the din. Nobody said anything back but I could see everybody’s smiles start to fade. With my tube under my belly I approached them head on… which was foolish looking back. In my left hand I filmed with the action camera, in my right I tried to keep my can of beer above the water. I don’t know what I was expecting. Vessels designed to go over rapids, like kayaks and rafts, make it seem so easy. It turns out rapids form because of rocks. In a car tube, you float over these no problem. Not with our tuk tuk tubes. As soon as I hit the first rapid I realised my mistake. The tube took the brunt of the first rock but this was enough to flip me broad side. There was no stopping at this point so I just held onto my belongings and howled in pain. The other three didn’t have enough time to make it to the bank — behind me, I heard a barrage of swearing and screams. Thankfully the bad patch only lasted for 20 metres or so and everyone made it to a sandy beach at the bottom. We were all bleeding from somewhere but it was just a few cuts and bruises. I felt a burning pain in my left knee, which was surprising, as my leishmaniasis wound was on the right. Well now I was symmetrical once again, with a healthy scrape on both. “Hopefully that’s the last of the Rapids.” Matty Teng was gazing up at the steep sides of the canyon we were about to enter. If we hit rapids in there that were slightly more powerful and a bit longer in length we were in serious trouble. We all took swigs of our beer for courage, realised they were now just cans of river water and got back on our tubes. As the river approached the canyon two things happened which made my pulse quicken. We started to go a lot faster and the sun set. “14 Kilometres per hour!” Came Robbies update as we left the farm fields behind and saw the moon poking above the hills. “Thank God it’s a full moon.” The water we were floating in transformed from a brown snake into a channel of silver mixed with midnight blue. The oranges and reds faded from the mountain side and our eyes strained to adjust to the darkness. I stretched my feet down to where I could normally feel sand but there was nothing. The trees on either side stretched over the waterway and occasionally a shout would come from the front
