Where were we?…
Ah yes on a river bank in the jungle.
There were in fact several other people there to meet us. They were specifically there to help us get the bikes over the next obstacle.
Waiting in the river was a large dugout canoe (probably the largest one I have seen) but there was no ramp that I could see. We had to get all four bikes into this canoe in order to get taken down stream and out into the bay where the larger boat was waiting for us. The technique employed here was simple brute force. That is to say we simply rode the bikes one at a time into the river alongside the canoe and then everyone took hold and heaved the bike up about 1.2m and into the air, over the side and down into the canoe. The only reason that this worked was because we had about ten people there to help with the “laying on of hands”.
So now that we had the bikes all loaded into one canoe and the gear and luggage all loaded into another one, we pushed off and headed down the jungle shrouded stream.
This was getting very “Indiana Jones” and then more so as the river sped up and we had some small rapids and tight bends to negotiate while ducking under draping vines and keeping an eye out for anacondas :) The skipper on the little outboard and his mate with the long pole were quite competent though and we successfully made it through the jungle river past a small village of thatched huts in a jungle clearing and out into the bay.
The bay was however not as smooth as I would have liked and there was quite a bit of chop out there. If this canoe went over, it was going to be quite expensive. Again, the crew knew what they were doing and we didnt capsize or sink and fairly quickly came alongside the big boat out in the bay. Getting the bikes up the 3m onto the deck of the ship was comparatively easy though as they just used two block-and-tackles suspended from the rigging and hauled them up one at a time :)
