Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Kayaking the Amazon from Source to Sea with Darcy Gaechter

Episode Date: January 10, 2022

In this episode, Darcy Gaechter joins Sharon to talk about her incredible whitewater kayaking expeditions. Darcy is the first (and only!) woman who has kayaked the Amazon River from its source to the sea. The journey took 148 days and had plenty of misadventures alongside all of the adventure. Darcy lives in Ecuador and runs a kayak tour business, helping others achieve their dreams of whitewater kayaking along the country’s beautiful, winding rivers. Listen in as Darcy shares how her adventures have been successful through skill, perseverance, and learning the balance between planning ahead and improvising on-the-go. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome! I am absolutely delighted that you're here and that I get to share the story with you today. I am chatting with Darcy Gector, who is the first woman to kayak the entire Amazon River from its source in the mountains of Peru to the Atlantic Ocean in Brazil. It took over five months of kayaking, kayaking like eight to 10 hours a day. So I'm not going to give away any more than that, but you will find this story fascinating. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. Darcy, I am so excited to chat with you. Thank you for joining me all the way from Ecuador today. Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to chat with you as well. Oh, I, when I came across your story, I was like, I need to speak to this person. I love people that have unusual jobs, unusual stories, unusual adventures.

I love remote places. Like it's all the things that I love to talk about. So I'm excited to hear more about your story for people who don't know who you are, which I would assume is a lot of people tell us more about your book. Tell us more about what you do and maybe give us a clue about why we're even chatting today. All right. Yeah. So my name is Darcy Gechter.

I bet nobody knows about me, which is okay. I'm very shy and I like to sort of stay under the radar as much as possible. The reason I'm chatting here with you today, I assume is because I'm the first woman to kayak the Amazon river from source to sea, which was 148 day long journey and 4,300 miles. And probably you just wanted to see what kind of crazy person would actually do that. And then, you know, more challenging for me after the amazon journey i wrote a book about it and that was much more outside of my wheelhouse and a huge challenge but you know very rewarding and so the book is called amazon woman and i'm talking to you from ecuador because i run a whitewater kayak guiding company in ecuador during the winter times. And I really want to get into your

Amazon journey, but I am curious what makes kayaking in Ecuador specifically appealing to people? Why would people travel to Ecuador for a guided kayak experience? Yeah, I think two main reasons. Number one, you know, this time of year, people are starting to look for warm vacations to escape winter and cold and mud and snow and everything. So Ecuador is definitely warm. We've got that. And then Ecuador has the highest concentration of rivers per square kilometer of any country in the world. And so, you know, it's a pretty easy flight down here. And then once people get here, there's very little traveling. Like we don't drive more than like 85 kilometers away from our base. And so it's just tons of rivers in a really small place. So your kayaking to traveling ratio is quite good here. Obviously you're an expert kayaker. What about kayaking do you love so much?

kayaking do you love so much? I love the people that I've gotten to meet and the places that I've gotten to see through kayaking. You know, the sport is fun. I like the physical challenge and the mental challenge, but there's been so many nice surprises about kayaking to me. And the two biggest ones are these amazing places all over the world that I've gotten to travel to and the people that I get to meet. You know, growing up, I never imagined that I would have friends in Ecuador and Kenya and Siberia, and it's all because of kayaking. And I would imagine there's a lot of things that you can only see via kayak. There's a lot of countries that you can't, there's no, there's no road in the middle of a river. You can't see the, the shoreline, the banks of the river. There's a lot of cool places that you can only access via the water. Yeah, for sure. And I actually hated kayaking when I started because

I was really bad at it and I found it extremely frustrating. But what hooked me was that I went on a trip to Nepal and just exactly what you're saying. We got to go to all these places that very few other tourists got to see. And then, you know, half the time we were so remote, we weren't seeing any people at all. And then the people we did see were from these villages that were so far away from most, you know, most, most normal access. And I just thought, Oh, this is so cool. Like what other sport could get me to these really off the beaten path places. sport could get me to these really off the beaten path places.

We have talked about this whole journey. First of all, what was it that made you think, you know, what I want to do is kayak the entire Amazon? Well, I hope that my answer isn't too disappointing, honestly, but a lot of my life or like the direction my life has taken has been in some ways accidental or it's taken. I've not done things that I sort of planned my whole life or thought I would do. And the Amazon was just sort of a continuation of that because one of our clients who was coming to Ecuador, his name is David Midgley, but I'll just call him mid because that's his, what he goes by. He started coming to Ecuador. He kind of was that guy you were talking about that just woke up one morning and said, I'm going to kayak the Amazon and ran after Dick's sporting goods. And not quite, but he was basically having a midlife crisis and wanted to do one big adventure, but he, he wasn't a kayaker or a good kayaker. So he started coming

to Ecuador so we could teach him to be an expert kayaker so he could do this. And then he invited us to go with him and Don and I were both thinking about it and we thought, oh, the whitewater part would be awesome. That's, that's what we do. And then Don said to me one night, well, you don't want to just go and do the whitewater, do you? Because you have this chance to become the first woman to do it and think how amazing that would be. And as soon as he said that, I was like, yes, you are absolutely right. Like this, this is a really cool chance for a first and I think I can do it. So then I was game to go. And then the funny thing was after he said that he was really backpedaling because he

really hates flat water and he hates bugs and he's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Are you sure that we really should do this? And I was like, yes, Don, you've put the idea in my head and we are going now. And so Don is your longtime boyfriend. Exactly. Okay. Okay. And he is who you run your current guide business with. Yes. Thank you for clarifying that.

Okay. So you have this client who comes to Ecuador to learn, to be an expert kayaker because he has this goal of wanting to kayak the entire Amazon. Exactly. And then your boyfriend was like, you should go the entire way with him down the Amazon because you could be the first woman to do it. Yes. Yes. Okay. So tell me more about the planning involved. planning involved. What goes into planning a months long trip down the Amazon in a kayak? Yeah, the logistics were really sort of mind boggling for a trip that big. And we started in whitewater kayaks and we switched into sea kayaks. So we had to bring two different kayaks and import them into Peru and then also import the sea kayaks to Brazil and get the sea kayaks

dropped off where we wanted to start. And we had to arrange like various food drops because the car could, for the first 10 days, the car could meet us every night. But after a while we'd have like these eight to 10 day stretches where there was no access. So we'd have to find some random Peruvian dude to like deliver our box of food to some GPS coordinates that we wrote on them. The list went on and on. And we, we did a ton of planning before the trip, but even, even with all that, we carried a satellite phone with us. And quite often from camp every night, we'd have to get out the satellite phone and, you know, like check on the progress of the kayak delivery or, Oh, we didn't think about this. We got to get this bag shipped here. So it was sort of like constantly evolving logistics as we went down the river.

It seems like so many moving parts. And if things didn't work out, I mean, it's almost like true disaster could occur. In some places, definitely, yes. Bad planning when we were in the serious whitewater canyon of the expedition would have been disastrous for sure. But luckily, you know, the whitewater part was what Don and I were most comfortable with. And so we were very well prepared for all that. And then the rest of it, certain things could have been disastrous, but one sometimes frustrating, but sometimes awesome thing about Latin America and South America in particular, is you can make things happen on a moment's notice

here. I always like to pre-plan out everything well in advance, but that doesn't work that well in Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, but you can like, oh my God, we ran out of this, this, or this. And you can make it happen in these countries. And people are so excited to help you. And so nice. And, you know, one of our sea kayaks got delivered without a hatch cover. So they have these back hatches that can hold all your camping gear and all kinds of stuff. And one of them was missing a cover. So that meant it would fill up with like hundreds of gallons of water. And we're in this tiny little village. And of course we can't get another hatch cover in this village, but these guys just like, we told them what was happening and they just took off running into town.

And they came back five minutes later with like this heavy duty plastic and a bicycle inner tube tire to tie around the edge. And they just like built this little makeshift hatch. And it was like, okay, perfect. Off we go now. And that kind of stuff happened all the time, which was awesome. Wow.

Well, okay. So when you say that in South America, you can just make things happen. Do you think that is cultural? Is it just that you can explain to somebody what you need and they are eager to assist you? What do you mean by you could make things happen? I think it's two things.

Planning ahead is not really something that happens here. So for example, it's really weird when I call the guy that owns the vans we use in Ecuador three months in advance and say, we want them on these days. He's like, why are you telling me so far in advance? But if I call up, you know, two nights before a trip and say, I need a new rack put on that van, then, you know, everybody knows a welder who can make a rack and make it happen. And yeah, that's just like, they're more accustomed to doing things last minute for one thing. And they're just like, there's just a better availability of improvisation. People get excited to make things happen, to figure them out. You know, it's just like, again, this puzzle solving thing. And it's like, yeah, everybody

rallies and gets things done, which is fun. That is really interesting that the perhaps culturally, perhaps some other explanation, the expectation is that you will request something when you need it. expectation is that you will request something when you need it. Exactly. And not six months in advance. Exactly. That is very interesting. I feel like not all Americans, of course, but I feel like a lot of Americans would feel put upon, or like you were being really demanding to try to get something to happen immediately. Like I need to wrap racket on this van immediately. People would be like, it's not my fault. You didn't plan ahead. Exactly. Exactly. And here, when you try to plan ahead, they're like, what's wrong with you? Tell me when you actually need it. Right. I'm not going to remember. I'm going to do it the day before. And I'm not going to remember that you, that you needed done for three months from now. So it took you a considerable amount of planning

because you couldn't just assume that kayaks were going to appear when you needed them. But yet you probably also had enough experience with South America that you knew that you could make things happen if worse came to worst. I still like to try to plan ahead, but we did know deep down that we could make it happen when we needed to. And that's pretty much how we did it. You know, we did try to arrange some support boats in advance, but most of the time, everything came down to like, okay, a day or less in advance. We'll just make it happen when we get to wherever we're going and we need the thing that we need.

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every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, I want to hear more about getting to the source of the Amazon. Tell everybody where it is and how you get there. So the sources in Peru, this was another part of our planning thing from like 1950 until 2012, the whole geographical world agreed that the Apurimac River in Peru was the longest tributary of the Amazon and therefore the source. longest tributary of the Amazon and therefore the source. But about six months before we went on our expedition, a guy named Rocky Contos discovered that another river called the Montaro River, which is also in Peru, was 47 miles longer. So it was actually the true source. So we had bought

topographic maps and planned everything out to descend the Aparimac, but then Rocky discovered the Montaro was longer. So we kind of scrambled at the last minute and switched plans to the Montaro. And the way we got there was we drove, we flew to Lima and from Lima, we drove up into the Andes mountains and the road takes you to a place called Lago Acucocha. And we put our kayaks in, in this lake. And then we paddled across the lake, the mountains on the other side and we just hiked around this mountain looking for the highest elevation flowing water that we could find and people have all these arguments over what is the source and so if the water goes underground for a while it doesn't count so you have to find like from where it pops out of the ground and stays on the surface and so we hiked around until we all agreed on one source and it was about

that wide where we started. So we couldn't kayak up there, obviously like four inches wide. Yeah. Like four inches wide. So then we, we walked back down to the lake, basically paddled across the lake to the outlet and then kayaked from there. And so the plan of course, is it's not like you're having a leisurely day kayak and then you're staying at a luxurious bed and breakfast every night. You have to camp while you're doing this and you have to carry all of your camping gear with you when you're kayaking for the day. How long of a day is it? So we, in the whitewater section, we were kayaking about eight to 10 hours a day. So it was pretty, it was definitely long days in the whitewater. And

when we got to the flat water, mid started to get worried that he was going to get like an overuse injury, like tendonitis or something like that. So then he cut the paddling schedule back to about six hours a day. We were always very tired and excited to go to bed by the time we got to camp. And how did you decide where to camp? Were you like, let we're tired. Let's pull over. Or did you have a pre-planned schedule of we're going to stop here? No pre-planned schedule in the whitewater. It was much more, Oh, we're tired. We're going to stop here. But oftentimes it would be sort of sheer cliffs on both sides of us. So we'd have to wait till we got to a point that had, you know, a sandy beach or at least some flattish ground.

So we didn't always get to camp exactly when we were tired. And some days we actually had to push, you know, another hour or two after we had quote reached our limits till we could find a camp spot. But then when we got to the flat water, uh, we had more pre-planned camp spots and mainly for safety reasons. There's a lot of sort of dangers from people down there. And so we would camp at someone's town or village and they would say, okay, the next safe spot is this town. So then we would plan to get to that town to camp sure okay so when you are pulling into camp for the night do you have everybody have their own tent is everybody sleeping in one tent how does that work so don and i shared one tent and midge had a bivy

bag for himself and then we all shared a stove we We brought a jet boil to boil water and made dehydrated meals for our dinners. We had one for breakfast and one for dinner. And we mainly just skipped lunch. We'd normally get to camp maybe about one hour before dark. We would have our dinner, make any calls that we needed to make on the satellite phone, if any logistics needed to be made, and then eat dinner and go to bed. And get up when it got light, which was normally about 5.00 AM and get ready to go kayaking again. And so what meals would be, would you really focus

on trying to eat high calorie meals? Because I would imagine, first of all, you're burning a ton of calories, dehydrated food doesn't naturally have tons of calories. It doesn't naturally have tons of fat and whatnot in it. How did you keep from losing 50 pounds while you were doing this? We did, we all lost weight, even despite our best efforts, but, and I'm vegan too. So that complicates things even further, but there are backpackers pantry makes like five different vegan dehydrated meals. And I would just mainly rotate through those, but one of them, I can't even remember the name of it, but it came with packets of peanut butter in it. It was like a peanut sauce thing. And that one had like a thousand calories per bag. So that

one, I brought the most of those. Cause that was a pretty good meal where some of the other ones only had like 500 calories per bag, which just really isn't enough. So yeah, we, we tried to eat the high calorie ones, but in that first month we. So yeah, we, we tried to eat the high calorie ones, but in that first month we all lost weight, but when we got to the flat water, it was much easier to buy food in all the towns and cities and stuff. And so we, we put the weight back on. I think we also started drinking a lot of beer at night and that helped add it up to the calorie calorie count for the day. Yes. Tell me about what it is like to sleep on the banks of the Amazon river in a tent. In the whitewater section, it was pretty nice. It

was still kind of cool up there. Like our, our first three nights, our water bottles froze solid in our tent because it was so cold. We started at over 15,000 feet in elevation. And so then, you know, most of the whitewater canyon was still pretty cold or cool at night. And that was, that was quite pleasant. But then of course, when we get to the flat water, it's very hot and it's very buggy. And again, we were trying to camp in either villages or at least at fishing camps. And so when we were down there, life was sort of funny at night. Like the fishermen would always be playing like soccer games on the radio or something. And it was, everything was much more active and much less secluded when we got to the flat water section of the river.

And you said the whitewater section of the river took you around a month to get down? Yeah, around a month. Wow. How much advanced education did you do where you're like, okay, well, we know that around this section of the map, the Rapids are serious. How much of that did you know in advance versus how much did you just like wing it? So the guy Rocky Contos to discover that this river was longer he kayaked the entire river about a year or not quite a year before we went and he didn't give us a ton of specific information about the river but he did tell us everything that you cannot portage is runnable what does that mean

so that means the portage is if you have to stop and walk around around okay okay if it's too big of a rapid or too dangerous then you would just carry your kayak around it. And we call that a portage. But what he meant basically was where the canyon was really walled in and where walking around was not an option because of the sheer cliffs on either side. But that part, those parts were all runnable. You could navigate them in a kayak and everything that was too hard to run or too dangerous had a more open shore. So you could get out, you could look, you could walk around it. And he had given us that information. And so we went in,

you know, feeling like, okay, this is something we can deal with. And Don and I have done a lot of kayaking of new rivers where we don't know where we're going. So we're pretty good at figuring it out either from in the kayak or when it's too steep and you can't see enough, you just have to get out and scout. But so we did, you know, we basically had to figure it all out for ourselves, except that we had this knowledge in the back of our minds, like, okay, someone else has done this and they survived. So we can, we can figure it out.'s not a secret niagara falls up ahead exactly the one big problem that we did have is they're they're building a new dam

in the middle of one of the hardest whitewater canyons and and we knew that we knew that they were working on a dam and we had meetings with the project manager before the trip started to get them to stop their dynamite work when we got there because they were building a new road in and dynamiting like a thousand feet up building their road down to the river so we knew what a little bit what we were getting into but when we actually got there it was the construction was a lot further along than we had anticipated and they had dynamited so many rocks like the size of houses and buses into the river that a lot of the water was like going underneath the rocks instead of

over them. Those is a lot more dangerous situation than we had psyched ourselves up for, I guess. And we were in there like eight hours. And that was definitely a very stressful part of the expedition was figuring it, figuring out that piece. What kind of animals did you see on this journey? So in the whitewater, again, it was like more in the mountains. So we saw fox and deer and river otters and then tons of birds. The entire trip had amazing birds the whole way, like parrots, parakeets, macaws, quetzals, all kinds of cool stuff. Scarlet ibis near the ocean, which for people that don't know what a scarlet ibis are, they're probably about like two feet tall and they're bright red, like the brightest red thing you can imagine. And they travel in flocks of like 40 to 50 birds.

So you would just see these like this red thing eclipse the sky with all these birds and then on when we're on the flat water again it's so populated along the flat water that you don't see a ton of wildlife because they the animals either get scared away or people do hunt them but we did see um pink river dolphins which was awesome that was definitely a highlight that's and big manta rays in the river. We saw some came in when we would shine our lights along the shore at night, we could see their eyes. And we saw one boa constrictor that was like a little baby one, about eight inches long, but that was it for snakes. And so when you are stopping for the night,

snakes. And so when you are stopping for the night, is it welcome to just camp wherever you feel like it? Do you have to ask, Hey, can we sleep here? How does that work? How do you negotiate where to sleep at night? Yeah. We always ask permission when there were people around again, in the whitewater, there was no people whatsoever. So we just camp wherever we wanted, but, um, down in the flat water. Yeah, we would always pull up to a town and ask their permission. You know, most of them had these big beaches in front of their towns and then the town was up on a little hill. So we just pull up our kayaks, walk into town, chat with them for a little while, explain what we were doing and then ask if we camp. And they always said yes. They're always awesome. And then they would also tell us, okay, you know, the next town down is,

is like three hours by motorized canoe. So that'll be six or seven hours for you guys camp at this place. And yeah, people are always extremely welcoming and friendly and very helpful. Hmm. And tell me more about, you had mentioned that some places were not places you would want to camp. They were perhaps dangerous. And some of the biggest dangers were from people. Is that mostly organized crime, like cartels? What are we talking about here? Where the whitewater ends begins an area that Peru calls the red zone.

And for us, it took us like 25 days to paddle through the red zone. And it's sort of a notoriously dangerous place. You know, it's funny. We had heard a lot before we went in there, like the indigenous people, the Ashahnaka, they're super dangerous, watch out for them. But the reality that we found when we got there is there's like a ton of drug trafficking there. This region became the world's number one cocaine producing region in the world in 2012. And so there's a lot of problems with that. And, you know, if you stumble upon a production facility or something that people aren't going to be that happy to see you. And then there's also a lot of illegal logging. So

these environmental groups estimate that 80% of the trees cut down in this region are cut down illegally. And again, they don't like it if you discover them or, you know, a lot of the indigenous people have been reporting indigenous logging in their territory. And then the loggers will come kill the indigenous people who are reporting this sort of thing. And then there's still Shining Path insurgents. So for people that don't know, the Shining Path was started in like the 1980s in Peru, and it was supposed to be this uprising of the poor and overthrow the rich bureaucrats in the city. But it really quickly turned into these insurgents, like killing all the poor people. And at first it was people in the highlands, but then they moved into the jungle regions and they killed a third of the ashahnaka indigenous people

population and they're still a bit of i mean that movement is the shining path movement is mostly over but there's still some holdouts there so then the indigenous people the ashahnaka are trying to protect themselves from the drug traffickers the loggers and the shining path people. That's just sort of this weird volatile area. And, you know, we didn't find any drug traffickers or loggers that we knew of. And everyone in there, you know, the Peruvians and the indigenous people alike were super friendly and very helpful, but they would say, you cannot stop until you get to this next town because it's very dangerous in between here. But it was sort of boring for lack of a better word. You know, we didn't have any external threat of the white water or the red zone. We were just paddling downstream. But then eventually we

started to hit the tides. Tides come up the Amazon river more than 600 miles. And it was super windy and the wind was always blowing up river. So if we stopped paddling, like just take a sip of water, we'd get blown back up the river. And so the natural conditions started to make things more interesting again for a while. And so you're like, now things are getting better because the conditions are more, I'm facing more adversity and I prefer that. Exactly. You know, you don't want to be bored. So when you say that tides go 600 miles up the Amazon, does that mean during high tide in the Atlantic that it is pushing water the opposite direction? Is that what you're saying? Yep, that is correct. And down when we were within 600 miles of the

ocean, there's basically like no river gradient. You know, a good whitewater river will drop like 100 vertical feet per mile. And here in that part of the river, it was like one centimeter of vertical drop per mile. So it's like no gradient at all. So yeah, when the tide was coming, you know, with high tide on the Atlantic, it would come up the river. And at first we could paddle against the tides. They weren't that strong, but eventually they were so strong that we would only make like two kilometers an hour when the tide was coming in. So we would start to just wait out the incoming tide, which meant we'd just find somewhere to sit for five hours while we were waiting for the tide to come in. And it was really hard to predict because they don't, they have tide charts for Belem, which is really close to the

coast, but they don't have any charts for up further up the river because everyone gets around on motorboat and they don't really care. Sure. They map out like all the sandbars for the big super tankers that come up the river, but they don't do any tide charts. So we would just have to see like, oh, the debris in the river is floating up river. The tide must be coming in. And then we just wait for it to shift and start going down river. And then we'd start paddling. Our last couple of months, it was so hard to make down river progress because of the tide and because of the winds and we, where we paddled out and we finished our expedition, we actually ended up, we had to paddle like 30 miles back up

the river to get to some civilization where we could fly out from. Sure. And it was so much easier paddling up the river than it had been paddling down the river for the last couple of months. Interesting. Okay. This is a question that I know a lot of people are going to be like, why didn't you ask that? I want to know the answer to that. How do you go to the bathroom when you are paddling eight to 10 hours a day? Do you take breaks? What happens? Yeah, we would take breaks. So the biggest danger to going to the bathroom was the insane amount of sand flies that would just attack any bare skin that you know and they come out during the day so we would always like try to set our alarms to get up in the dark and then once you were out on the river because of the wind the bugs weren't so bad during the day so when we were paddling downstream sometimes we'd pull over on shore if we needed to go pee or something, but I developed a system where Don could just paddle close to me and

I could kind of make a bridge, like put my hands on his boat and my feet in my boat and go pee in between the two. So we didn't have to go to shore and Don and Midge had Gatorade bottles that they could pee in, in their kayaks. Hope you don't mind me talking about all that. No, people are curious. People are curious. That's something people are number two. It was very important to do it before daylight. Like your tell your brain. It's not, it's not happening. If it's not dark. Exactly. Nope. That's not something I would have considered. Exactly. Nope. That's not something I would have considered. So tell me more. Was there ever a time that you felt scared either from the environmental conditions or scared from animals, people,

anytime you felt afraid? In the dam construction site, I was very afraid. We thought it would take us three hours to paddle through their construction site. So they said, okay, we'll stop dynamite for three hours. And like I said, it took us almost eight hours, but we hadn't seen any workers yet. So I assumed that they hadn't seen us either. And I was really convinced that they were going to start dynamiting again while we were still at the bottom of the Canyon. And obviously if they would have started dynamiting while we were down there, it would have chances are we wouldn't, I wouldn't be sitting here today. I was definitely very scared for that part of the trip. And that was definitely the worst. You know, I was, I was very scared going into the red zone because of all the stories I heard. But as soon as we got in there, you know, everyone we met was so nice and people

pretty quickly put me at ease. And I was still, you know, I didn met was so nice and people pretty quickly put me at ease. And I was still, you know, I didn't sleep a whole lot while we were there. Cause I was feeling like I had to be listening, but I felt a lot better once we got there, the anticipation was a lot worse than the actual experience. Sure. Sure. So when you started getting to the end of the Amazon, how wide is the Amazon sort of at its, at its mouth? 250 miles wide, I think at the mouth. That is not, that is like the size of a lake. That's the size of a great lake. It's totally huge. And I, some fact checkers out there, I mean, you're probably doing it right now because I know that you do that. And I appreciate that.

I might be wrong about that, but you can't see the other side. And the mouth, where the Amazon hits the ocean, it splits into two different channels and it goes around an island the size of Switzerland, I think. Oh, my goodness. And so I'm pretty sure the distance from the southernmost point to the northernmost point is around 250 miles. Wow. So we went to the Southern Channel and it's totally crazy. You definitely feel like you're paddling in the ocean already or in a giant lake. We were following the south, the southern bank, because we didn't want to be out in the middle because then, you know, you're feel like you're in the ocean. And I already said, I don't like that. So we're following

the right bank. But a huge river called the Tocantins River comes in. And so we had to paddle across the mouth of that river as it joins the Amazon. And that was an 18 kilometer crossing just across the mouth of that river. So I think that's 12 miles ish. And yeah, that one we couldn't see like any land at all when we were in the middle of that crossing. And we had just set our compasses to this point of land that we were trying to reach. But it was sort of hard to calculate like the tide was coming in. So it was pushing us up the other river and the wind was blowing us up the other river. So we were trying to kind of keep an angle

to fight the wind and the tide. Then we made it to the other side of that river. And then we took these little tiny channels that wind up, which were much easier paddling when we were in the small channels. And then our last two days, uh, we were just out in truly what felt like open ocean. And when it was dark, we could pat, like put our paddles in the water and see the bioluminescence from the little critters in the water. And, um, yeah, when we finished, we could see our point of land. That was our landing spot that was off to our right. We finished at a spot that was about two miles distant from the right shore. And then just couldn't see anything but open water in every other direction.

Wow. So when you finally got to the end, were you like, you were getting towards the end and you know, like, oh my gosh, I know we're almost done. Were you ready to be done? Were you like, I cannot wait for this to be over? Or how are you feeling about that? be done? Were you like, I cannot wait for this to be over or how are you feeling about that? Yes, I was extremely ready to be done, but when we actually did finish, it was the worst feeling, you know, for like months I had been sort of dreaming of all these things I wanted to do when the Amazon ended, like sleep with a pillow and eat like a salad, you know, go skiing or just use my legs. Cause we've just been sitting in the kayaks for so long. I was so excited to have the trip over with. And then I woke up the next morning, like when we had finished and it was just, I had this feeling

of what do I do now? You know, cause for 148 days, we knew we were going to wake up, eat breakfast and go kayaking. And we had this purpose, which was to kayak paddle to the Atlantic. And then it just felt so empty when it was over. I was like, oh, my life no longer has a purpose. Now I have to figure out something else to do. What is something that you learned that might surprise other people or something that you learned that you didn't anticipate that you would learn from this journey? So I prepared a lot for the physical aspects of the journey. You know, when I thought about doing it, it's like, okay, I have to be in really good kayaking shape. I have to have good endurance. And I really prepared for all of that stuff.

But this is, this sounds so stupid when I say it out loud now, but I, I didn't anticipate the mental or the emotional challenges of a trip that big. And it was just Don Midge and I, the three of us for five months stuck together 24 seven, and that's challenging in and of itself. And then of course you throw in all the adversity of the actual expedition and the mental challenges were just huge. And I just really learned, you know, I couldn't control the pace that Midge was going to kayak at that day. And I couldn't control the wind. Now that I learned there was all these things I couldn't control. And I was just beating my head against the wall, worrying about them so much. And the

only thing that I could control was my own attitude. And I always knew that, you know, your mental state can make a big difference, but the Amazon, it was so, you know, blatantly obvious when I was in a little bit of a bad mood or had a little bit of a negative outlook, I would just be so mad at the guys or the weather, the river, whatever it was. And if I could just tweak my own outlook a tiny bit, it was like, oh, you know, the life was just so much better. And that was a really great thing to learn on the Amazon. And a great lesson to take forward into life, frankly.

Yeah, absolutely. Yes. We will all be faced with tremendous adversity at some point in our lives and very little can be controlled about it, but our own selves. Yeah. And if you're like, oh, this is ruining everything, you know, you can take it as a, you know, a personal insult or just think it's the worst thing that can happen. Or you can say, well, all right, how do we fix

this problem? How do we get around this obstacle? And it's just a difference in attitude, you know, makes the world of difference in how you tackle your problems and overcome them. the world of difference in how you tackle your problems and overcome them. I love that. That is so true. And it changes the way you experience life. Yes, totally. And you have the option to turn it into almost like a fun game of how can I overcome this obstacle? It very much changes how you experience it. Oh my goodness. I feel like I have could just ask you a million more questions, but I will leave it there for today. Tell everybody more about your book so that they can buy it and read it. They're interested in hearing more about the specifics of your journey. All right. Yeah. My

book is called Amazon woman and, um, Don came up with that title, which I really love, but it's not the best title if you're searching on Amazon.com. So you have to write in Amazon woman and Darcy, and then you can find my book. But yeah, the book is obviously it's about the expedition, but it's also a lot about my experiences in life. I'm very short and skinny and my whole life people have looked at me and automatically assumed that I couldn't do things like kayaking or or play sports or basically do anything that I want to do so I've just spent so much of my life you know trying to prove to the world that little wimpy looking women are really capable of big things and so the book is sort of about my attitude and how that played into my desires to kayak the Amazon. And if people want to follow me on Instagram, it's Darcy Gector. This was absolutely fascinating. Thank you for making time to do this from Ecuador.

Thanks so much for having me on your show. I'm a big fan. I listened to your episode with Kate. She's very inspirational. Oh, she really is. I love her. Thank you so much, Darcy. I really appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor, would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating or a review? Or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. I cannot wait to have another mind blown moment with you

next episode. Thanks again for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast.