After six days in the Colca canyon they stopped counting kilometres and began counting metres. Instead of the planned five or ten kilometres a day they were covering two or less, the food was running out, and the last forty-five kilometres of the first stretch they ran drinking water straight from the river and eating sugar with it. They lost one kayak, one of them nearly died, the floor of the raft split. Seven students from Kraków paddled where no one had reached before.
Boys who wanted to be like Columbus
It started in 1972 in Kraków, in the Bystrze student kayak club. Ordinary paddling was not enough for them. They looked for rivers no one had run that way before and dreamed – as one of the club's founders, Jerzy Majcherczyk, recalled years later – of being like Columbus. They began on Polish rivers. Then came Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and further trips, each one leading further than the last.
In 1970s Poland there was nowhere to buy whitewater gear, so they made it themselves: they laminated their own kayaks, sewed sleeping bags, welded trailers. That self-reliance later proved more important than any sponsor's backing. When they decided in 1979 to go to the Americas, they had years of such tinkering behind them and experience gathered on hard rivers in Europe.
Trouble right from the start
The first plan fell apart before they even left. CanoAndes was to start in Argentina, but at the end of 1978 Argentina and Chile stood on the brink of war over the islands in the Beagle Channel. They had to drop the original route and plan the whole expedition almost from scratch. The problems did not end there. A Star 266 truck borrowed from AGH with a trailer, loaded with 21 kayaks and around 25 tonnes of gear, was to sail to the Americas by ship. But the transport was delayed by the winter of the century – the ship was stuck in the frozen port of Gdynia.
In the end they travelled differently. The gear left by ship on 6 June 1979; they flew to Mexico via London and New York, an invitation from the Mexican government arranged for them by the Polish ambassador. Mexico was meant to be only a stop on the way to the Andes, but it turned out there were mountain rivers there too, and some of them they ran for the first time in history. So an adventure became a months-long exploration. Before they reached the Colca canyon, almost two years and more than twenty rivers had passed.
All that time they lived on next to nothing. By Colca they had two last kayaks laminated back home and a badly worn raft bought in the States. The Polish fishing fleet was moored in the port of Lima, so they went aboard the ships and sang to the sailors, and in return got half a tonne of frozen fish. The Peruvian government gave them five hundred dollars for film stock.
Down into the canyon
They set off into the Andes from Arequipa on 12 May 1981. The next day, in the village of Chivay, word reached them that John Paul II had been shot in Rome. They did not know whether the pope was alive. In the back of the truck they carried a picture with the words "A Pope from Poland", given to Majcherczyk before he left by his mother, who told him it would protect them. On 17 May they came down to the canyon floor below the village of Cabanaconde, and a day later they put the boats on the water.
Ahead of them lay a hundred kilometres of a river no one had run before, and walls rising three and four kilometres above the water. Colca dropped steeply, in places by more than sixty, according to the team even seventy-five metres per kilometre. Many rapids could not be run, so the boats and gear had to be carried over almost vertical slopes. After six days they were covering two kilometres a day, the food ran out, and the last three days of the first, forty-five-kilometre stretch they ran on river water with sugar. They lost a kayak, the floor of the raft split, the second kayak they patched on the move. Over that time all seven of them lost nearly eighty kilograms between them.
Thirty metres before the edge
Majcherczyk came closest to death just before the place they later named the Canyon of the Poles. Chmieliński, out in front in his kayak, shouted at them to stop at once: the river's horizon was vanishing. They were in a vertical chute, in a tearing current, with almost nothing to hold on to. They managed to drive in a hook only thirty metres before the edge. No one knew what lay beyond it. Majcherczyk, as captain, went down the wall on a rope tied to his belt to check. He saw a waterfall. When he felt he could hold on no longer, he pushed off from the rock and dropped into the river. The current carried him off and the situation turned deadly; luckily he caught another rope and did not go over the falls.
And the waterfall was more than twenty metres high. Standing above it, exhausted, still not knowing whether the pope had survived, they decided to name it after him. The last fifty-five kilometres were easier. For their effort, as Majcherczyk put it, nature rewarded them with a feast for the eyes: vertical walls three and four kilometres high, condors overhead, geysers bursting from the ground. What mattered most was that no one had seen it before them.
What stayed on the map
The Poles left behind names still used today: the John Paul II Waterfalls and the Canyon of the Poles, and in the nearby villages the Avenues of the Poles. The Colca canyon itself runs for a hundred and twenty kilometres of its deepest part, and at the place they named the Chocolate Canyon its walls reach more than three kilometres above the river. For years there was an argument over whether it is the world's deepest canyon; today it competes for the title with the neighbouring Cotahuasi, because everything depends on which wall you measure.
Fame in Peru, silence in Poland
In Peru they became famous. The country's president received them and put them up in a hotel to recover; they published the first guide in Latin America to Peru's mountain rivers. In Poland almost no one heard of it. Martial law was just beginning, some of the team did not return home, and there was no one to speak loudly of their success. The whole expedition, from leaving Poland, lasted thirty-three months and was one of the longest group expeditions of the twentieth century: twenty-three rivers, thirteen run for the first time. Only years later did tourists discover the canyon; today several hundred thousand people visit it a year, and on its rim there is a school named after John Paul II, of which Majcherczyk is patron.
What came after
Colca was only the beginning. In 1985 Piotr Chmieliński became the first person to run the entire Amazon, from source to ocean. In 2002 part of the old team returned to the Colca canyon, twenty years after the first descent. And all of it grew from a single idea of a student club: to paddle where the rivers are still unknown.