Vintage Departures
2 total works
This is a firsthand account of a small band of Amazonian warriors and their battle to preserve their way of life from the scourge of civilization. Joe Kane, author of "Running the Amazon", returns to the river to search for the Huaorani, a nation of 1300 nomadic warriors so remote that their language is unrelated to any other on Earth. For millenia all comers have been turned away from their land, a territory in the middle of the Ecuadorian Amazon the size of Massachusetts, USA. In the 1990s, the Huaorani are besieged by oil companies, missionaries, indigenous bureacrats and envionmentalists intent on helping them "better" themselves. This book recounts the efforts of the Huaorani to vault from the Stone Age to the "Petroleum Age".
In 1986 a party of 12 explorers attempted to travel the full length of the Amazon. Joe Kane's original role was as a writer and observer but he ended up as one of the only two members of the original group to complete the entire journey, the only expedition ever to travel the entire 4200 mile Amazon river from its source high in the Andes to its union with the Atlantic Ocean. The expedition took them, by foot, raft and kayak, through one of the world's deepest canyons, through deadly whitewater rapids and into one of the last sections of virgin rain forest in the Western hemisphere, home to outlaw guerillas, primitive Indian nomads and cocaine traffickers. The resulting chronicle is an adventure story of a journey fraught with dangers but ultimately achieving its goal.