Ben Kozel: Three Men in a Raft

By DAVID HILL

There's this Aussie and this Canadian and this South African, see? And they set out to row this rubber raft 7000km down the Amazon.

No, it's not a joke, though much of the preparation (five afternoons training in whitewater rafting) and some of the writing fall into that category.

It's not an Edwardian Three Men in a Boat idyll, either. This is an emphatically end-of-the-20th-century journey. Our chaps are shot at by Shining Path guerrillas, stopped by unattractive paramilitaries, pestered by cocaine peddlers.

They begin by trekking inland from the Pacific Ocean across Peru to Pilpinto, which I had never heard of either, where the rafting begins.

On the way, Ben climbs Mt Mismi and sloshes through the chilly puddles that are the Amazon's headwaters.

Before they even get to launch their rubber truckie, they have had diarrhoea and frozen feet, and their only stove has packed a sad.

Down the exuberant Apurimac they skim. A lot of rapids are described in a lot of detail. They lose their cooking gear, their Nikes, their rosy optimism. Gradually and garrulously, they form a team.

On the enormous, sluggish Amazon, the raft makes clunky progress. So they jerry-rig it as a rowboat and set themselves a 24-hour rowing regime to get home while there's anyone left who still knows them.

They meet shy boys with automatic weapons, a technicolour pharmacist, a bordello madam willing to show them her beast-taming techniques. They paddle through a delta so wide, its far shore is over the horizon.

They reach the unprepossessing Atlantic and celebrate with $2 champagne. It took them five months, and only three others had done it before. It was one staunch effort.

Kozel is over-fond of adjectives and parentheses and can't resist a laddish anecdote, a verbatim conversation or a cricketing metaphor.

But he has a sense of narrative, a respect for place and an affection for his mates. He is pleased with what they did, but not too smug about it. Most of his story bowls along. Feel pleased enough if you sight him on a river near you soon.

Macmillan

$34.95