Bloodied but Still Unbowed on the Trail

SAN GERARDO, Costa Rica —  At dusk, the road through San Gerardo at the base of Chirripo Grande looked like roll call at the end of the world.

A filthy stream of shivering, bloodied Raid Gauloises teams limped, strode, or ran past the applause of villagers in a steady rain. Their smiles, if you could see any faces beneath the poncho hoods, revealed relief to be off that hellacious mountain rather than happiness at being anywhere else.

Our assistance team had rented us a seven-bunk room at a roadside posada and pampered us by presenting a fruit punch spiked with rum. Though we felt indulgent and guilty, we learned from the senora who fixed us chicken, rice and beans that 11 other teams had preceded us at her table.

Because we skipped the top of Chirripo, we now found ourselves in the middle of the back of the pack. That gave us a chance to finally meet other competitors. A Belgian team, for instance, limped into the inn several hours after us and said we were wise not to have gone to the top.

It had taken them seven hours from the checkpoint at 10,932 feet. Above the tree line, there had been no protection from the cutting rain. The path undulated “like huge waves on the sea,” said Marie-Pierre Fourny of Liege, France, and at the crest of eight separate aretes she thought they had reached the peak--only to make out another crest just ahead.

They passed another squad that had all but given up, believing themselves hopelessly lost, frozen and out of food. But finally the Belgians found the top, numbly wrote their names in a book crammed into a tin box under a rock and scurried down the mountain of mud in the dark.

Even now there would be little time to rest. The next leg of the race was a 20-kilometer run, followed by 65 miles of rafting. The top teams had stopped in San Gerardo just long enough to check in, hand their backpacks to their assistants and change into running shoes. The Belgians slept at the posada only until 2:45 a.m., then headed off in a drizzle for the rafts. We slept until 4:30 and left at 6, lazily repacking gear and eating a big breakfast.

Running through the countryside under a sunny sky on good dirt roads, we passed dozens of well-kept homes. Even the most modest ones had magnificent teak doors. School kids waved and cried out best wishes. Grandmothers, standing just inside doorways with tiny dogs yapping at their heels, smiled dreamily. Darkly tanned men paused from their work swinging machetes in banana fields.

Despite the superb weather and reception, I had begun to feel thoroughly nauseous. I suspected the persimmon juice I drank at the posada was diluted with local water--and too late warned the others away from it at breakfast. By the time we had jogged to a village called General Viejo, where the rafts awaited alongside the Rio General, I had a fever and chills. I took an antibiotic, and we changed into wet suits.

Our team leader, Eric, an accomplished river guide in France, gave out assignments: Kaz and I would paddle on the left, Mike and Catherine on the right, and he would stay in back to steer. Just upstream, another team prepared its raft, and behind them by an hour or two were four more. It felt great to have competitors again, even if we had skipped Chirripo’s summit to join them.

We pushed off and hit a series of Class III rapids--real jolters--right away. Tree branches hung low over the river, forcing us to duck and swerve. As glad as we were to be off the mountain, these reminded us quickly that the river, too, can be deadly.

Rafting is all about stimulus. On a fast-moving river, life appears to hang in suspense between big rapids. Each presents the glory of total peril, and you begin to crave them like a junkie.

The Rio General presented a special challenge to the river specialists on our teams because they were seeing each rapid for the first time: This was a race, so there was no time to study charts, park the raft, walk downriver to survey the treachery ahead, then proceed safely. Each stretch--fitted with nicknames like “Go Left and Die”--had to be taken at full speed. The eight meanest of them were graded Class IV and V--as tough as any in the world--and the Raid posted small rescue crews to assist teams that might flip onto the rocks or plunge into the whirlpools.

To avoid those mistakes, a team has to keep its boat going faster than the current. Mike, Kaz and Catherine whooped it up as we paddled hard through these rapids--Eric deftly making all the right moves at the stern--while I could barely keep my eyes open. The antibiotic had made me drowsy, yet every splash of water struck my body like a knife thrust, cramps wracked my stomach and thunderclouds occasionally unleashed new cracks of rain. I paddled hard because I had to--our lives depended on each of us pulling our own--but descended into a vortex of misery.

The hours crawled by, for me a weird alchemy of exhilaration and dread, until we slid off the river at 5. I slept soundly and recovered, waking only to hear Eric and Mike moan over their own stomach cramps--they had scoffed at my warning about the delicious persimmon juice--and to see them crawl out of the tent in a pitiless drizzle to attend to their discomfort.

The river swelled overnight with the storm, and its pretty blue water turned brown and soupy. It was my turn to be strong, though, and I leaned into the paddling with renewed power. Yet with two of our strongest guys weakened, we failed to generate enough speed on the morning’s first rapid: an explosive, steeply tilted torrent of white water named “Screaming Right Turn”--because it cut a hairpin curve past a sheer wall of black rock.

We executed the turn, but hit a hole at the bottom with 50 tons of force, and in an instant I saw Kaz flicked out of the raft. I reached over to grab him, then somersaulted in myself. The river was fast, but I stayed near the raft and pulled myself in, only to look over the side and see Catherine bobbing and gulping down water. The river was rumored to carry typhoid and Hepatitis A. I reached over to grab her by the back of her life jacket and used all my strength to yank her up and into the boat.

She gasped and turned green, her eyes rolling back in their sockets. Eric steered the raft over to shore, and Kaz, in a daze, walked up with three paddles that had also gone overboard. It was our worst mistake on the river and wouldn’t be repeated.

We paddled soberly after that through flat water, encountering only one more Class IV rapid, and enjoyed the magnificent change of ecosystems: As we drew closer to the ocean, the sharp-edged ridges of the jungle cliffs gradually softened into rolling woodlands. We passed Indian men fishing out of dugout canoes, ancient stone bridges and a boy who rode down on horseback from the hills to offer us bananas. We also saw a 15-foot yellow iguana sunning itself on a rock, several herons and an otter.

Later, teams that finished among the first five told us that they wished they had picked their heads up from the paddling. They couldn’t recall seeing any wildlife on the Rio General.

Despite the beauty, it was a long, hard pull into the next checkpoint at Paso Real, and our shoulders ached when we turned in the raft and got into canoes. Still, we learned we were ahead of three other teams, and if we could paddle very hard we might make it to the final river checkpoint at Palmar Norte by 5:30.

But we had no such luck. Soon after we lashed our canoes together we could see a wall of mist ahead, and in a minute we were paddling into the fangs of another storm.

The choppiness of the swirling water accentuated the difference between a raft and a canoe: It was like switching from a Cadillac to a motorcycle. A canoe rides far less sturdily than a raft. You are practically right in the water, and even a Class II rapid makes you feel more like a leaf than a man. Splashed constantly by the waves and pummeled by the rain, our canoes sank even lower in the water.

Finally, we spied a good beach for bivouacking, and the rain miraculously stopped. We set up the tents next to trees whose branches sagged with the weight of giant caterpillar cocoons. Then we discovered that our waterproof bags hadn’t survived the last canoe run; most of our dry clothes and the sleeping bags were wet. Dispirited, we began to set up the stove just as another rainstorm swaggered up from the direction of the sea.

Shuffling along in the muddy sand, we built a tall shelter with sticks, ponchos, banana leaves and spare rope--and Mike shoved a canoe under it all to sit on. It was our seventh night. We were sick, beat, famished and shivering. We looked at each other with faces that silently asked, “Why?” Someone made a motion that we quit. We could spend the rest of the week on a Pacific beach somewhere, wear all the dry socks we wanted and drink fruity rum cocktails with pink umbrellas sticking out of then. We laughed and shook on it: This would be our last night on the Raid.

A few minutes later, though, we had drunk our first cup of soup and the rain stopped. The stars came out. We found a package of creme anglaise in our food barrel and got a warm, syrupy sugar high. Maybe life wasn’t so bad after all. We forgot about our bailout pact.

CANOEING TO APOCALYPSE LAGOON

The next morning dawned pink and warm. A team called Chronopost had apparently camped just upriver and awakened earlier, because they passed us at 5:35, yelling good-natured taunts in French. We packed quickly and leaped into our canoes then, the competitive spirit still alive among us third-tier teams.

More than 100 miles away at about the same time, the first-place team crossed the finish line in Puerto Jimenez. Even though we had already sped from an elevation of 10,000 feet to 100 feet in three days, it would be four more days before we joined the winners.

We failed to catch Chronopost right away, but it didn’t matter. After deflating the canoes at Palmar Norte and loading them atop a bus, our two teams tumbled into that broken-down town together and anxiously searched for money to buy Coca-Colas. We stripped to our underwear and luxuriated in the sunshine.

Then we climbed aboard a Raid bus for the short drive to Sierpe, where the final leg of the race would begin. I felt high and giddy and blessed with good fortune, basking in the warmth of the day and the other racers’ company as someone put a rowdy Santana tape into a boom box and we sang like drunks.

I learned then that the General Media team, sponsored by a big Parisian advertising agency, also had barely survived Chirripo Grande. Juliette Ambilla, an extravagantly thin and tall woman from Paris, said that their leader, a Grenoble mountain guide, carried two of her male teammates’ packs on his back for the peak’s final 1,200 feet.

She also passed along the ugly news that the men on a Luxembourg team had abandoned their female teammate on the back of the mountain for 24 hours because she lagged behind. Such was the dimension of the competitive zeal at the front of the pack.

We, too, became competitors again after arriving in sizzling-hot Sierpe. The air there carried the electric charge of a carnival, as dozens of locals crowded around.

Each team had its own theory on when to leave Sierpe to cross an ocean estuary for the next checkpoint and kept its own counsel. Tide tables showed that we should leave either at 12:30 p.m. or 7 p.m. After repacking gear, we put into the Rio Sierpe at 1:30, probably an hour late or 5 1/2 hours early.

After a week of pounding by the rain, now the moon and the sun were our enemies. Despite our best stab at mathematics, the tide was coming in while we were going out. And a warm wind came in with it. We pulled and pulled against our paddles, but the forces of nature pushed and pushed against us.

Just ahead were the canoes of a team called the Relax-O-Cats, so at least we weren’t the only crazy team on the water, and Kaz wanted nothing more than to catch them so he could record the moment with his camera. A gifted photographer and linguist who has covered guerrilla movements in Peru and the Philippines, Kaz works every minute at expending his energy. He appeared to revel in our plight because it would make him work harder.

Catching the X-O Cats turned out to be a snap, and soon afterward we followed the team--organized for fun by Aziz Ojjeh, a wealthy French-Saudi parachuting champion nicknamed “the blond giant” in the French press--down what looked like a shortcut. After all, he had guides from Costa Rica, New Zealand and France on his team. The passage grew darker, narrower and shallower. We crouched to avoid the thickly overhanging mangrove vines, and the stench of rotting vegetation grew overwhelming. Then we hit a dead end. Now we knew why Aziz wasn’t far from last place.

We’d lost an hour, and now the tide was rising toward us even more strongly as we slowly rounded a point and neared the ocean. At 5, we rounded another point and the X-O Cats disappeared. Unconcerned, we kept on going into the gathering dusk toward a checkpoint at Estero Guerra--the purple sky above stenciled with fluorescent orange and alive with darting, singing birds.

In our exhaustion, the checkpoint looked like a set from a Vietnam movie. We could barely see it in the dark, but it appeared to be a small wooden platform in the middle of a lagoon, surrounded by jungle. In the center, crouched around a stove, were two Raid staffers, Jean-Michel and Canard, river rats and ski bums who looked ready to be cast as pirates in “Apocalypse Now II.”

They were trying to persuade Chronopost, who had arrived 30 minutes ahead of us, to stay the night. It was not safe to hike in the jungle after dark. But neither they--nor the X-O Cats, who paddled up behind us--would listen. After they left, Canard promised we’d catch them before the end of the next day.

We would have a strange night’s sleep. Canard advised against bivouacking on shore because it was mobbed with mosquitoes and frequented by crocodiles. Instead, he suggested we sleep in our canoes, curled up in survival blankets.

As we turned in, Mike exclaimed, “Ah, this is the life!” I wanted to agree, but we were about to sleep in a steaming, stinking, buzzing jungle in a wet canoe--and had ahead of us another 14-hour day of hiking in mud. I decided I preferred a condo in Maui--and laid down on the wood platform.

Canard offered me a shot of rum before bedtime, and I took two. The only reason I didn’t take three was because if I rolled over tonight, I’d be croc bait.

Tuesday: The race for last place begins.