On the upper Apurímac, one of the Amazon's source rivers, the expedition explored two canyons no one had run before. Chmieliński said afterwards that there is no way out from inside them: the river runs in a narrow rock cleft, and you either paddle it or you don't. The worst of these stretches, which the expedition named the Acobamba Abyss, proved the hardest place on the whole route.
A kayaker from the Bystrze club
Piotr Chmieliński was born in 1952 in Słocina, now part of Rzeszów. He learned whitewater kayaking at the Kraków club Bystrze, the same one behind the CanoAndes ’79 expedition to the rivers of the Americas. During that expedition, in 1981, he paddled the first hundred kilometres of the Amazon's whitewater, and that was when the idea was born to run the whole river, from source to ocean.
Sources high in the Andes
The Amazon has no single obvious beginning. Its furthest source is taken to be the glacial stream Carhuasanta, running down the slopes of the Nevado Mismi massif at close to five and a half thousand metres. From there the water flows as the Apurímac, then, after further confluences, as the Ene, the Tambo and the Ucayali, until at last it becomes the Amazon. The expedition set out from that source in August 1985.
Canyons with no way out
The most dangerous stretch was the upper Apurímac. Two canyons, which the expedition named Black Canyon and the Acobamba Abyss, had not been explored by anyone before. The river dropped steeply through them, enclosed between vertical walls, with no chance of reaching the bank. Boats capsized in the rapids, and several of the party fell into the water, barely escaping with their lives. On top of that came altitude sickness, heat and exhaustion.
Guerrillas, cocaine and the pope
The river was only one of the dangers. During the expedition the party was stopped by fighters of the Maoist guerrilla group Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path). As Piotr Chmieliński recalled years later, the guerrillas finally let them go once they learned they were Poles, compatriots of John Paul II. Along the way the group spent a night on the grounds of a cocaine factory, passed drug traffickers, and met Indigenous people who had never before seen an outsider.
Who reached the ocean
The expedition was international and mixed. According to the account of one of its members, the American journalist Joe Kane, it was made up of eleven people, ten men and one woman. Only four reached the mouth at the Atlantic, after close to six months. Chmieliński was the only one who covered the entire river on the water, by kayak and raft. Kane, who also reached the end, walked part of the first whitewater stretch of the Apurímac overland. The expedition's photographer was another kayaker from Bystrze, Zbigniew Bzdak, who led a two-person team supporting those on the water.
Some of the data about this expedition still varies. The length of the river from source to mouth is given as anywhere between about six thousand four hundred and close to seven thousand kilometres, depending on how it is measured. The size of the team ranges from eleven to thirteen people across different sources, because the paddlers alone are counted one way and the whole crew with the land support another. The exact daily dates of the start and of reaching the ocean are not widely known either; what is certain is that the expedition began in August 1985 and lasted close to half a year.
The first full descent of the Amazon from source to mouth was recorded in the Guinness Book of Records. Chmieliński described his account in National Geographic magazine in 1987, and Joe Kane published a book about the expedition, "Running the Amazon", which became its fullest record. For Chmieliński, the Amazon was the next step after the Colca canyon, run four years earlier with the same Kraków team.