The Amazon River.
4,300 miles in length, running through Brazil, Columbia, and Peru.
It’s the second longest river in the world – between the Nile in Egypt and the Yangtze
in China.
It’s a rich ecosystem, supporting life throughout the Amazon rainforest.
While many animals call this place home, if you’re a human being and you’re not prepared,
this natural wonder of the world can quickly become a watery grave.
Sadly, thanks to crime, dangerous wildlife, and unpreparedness, there are many stories
of people visiting the Amazon River and never coming back.
When you think of scary things in or near the Amazon River, most people think of things
like the Green Anaconda – the largest snakes in the world, capable of swallowing pigs,
jaguars, and even humans.
Or the Amazonian Bull Shark, a huge, eleven-foot shark that will eat pretty much anything,
including human beings and its own species.
Or the menacing electric eel, that can deliver a lethal shock even eight hours after its
death.
Or even the bloodthirsty red-bellied piranha, known for being able to swarm and pick even
large prey completely clean of all flesh.
And let’s not even get into the nightmares of the giant tarantulas and centipedes.
However, the two real threats to Western kayakers visiting the Amazon River are the treacherous
white-water rapids of river itself and the brutal pirates who roam the waters.
That’s right, pirates.
But we’re talking less “spyglasses and cutlasses” and more “speedboats and AK47s.”
Because the Amazon River’s human population has experienced a boom in the past few decades,
and a successful drug trade has unfolded down the river, piracy has sadly flourished.
Heavily armed groups of well-organised criminals have been able to commit robbery, rape, and
murder along the river with abandon.
If you run into these pirates, and you follow all their orders and give them your belongings,
they may still shoot you just to tie up a loose end.
If you don’t follow their orders?
Unless you’ve got a lot of skill and an inhuman amount of luck on your side, you’re
pretty much doomed.
People have been shot, beaten to death, stabbed, strangled, and dismembered.
These pirates aren’t in the habit of leaving survivors – as their seafaring predecessors
always used to say, “dead men tell no tales.”
That brings us to South African modern-day explorer Davey du Plessis, an inspirational
exception to this rule.
In this mind-blowing episode of The Infographics Show, we’re going to tell you Davey’s
remarkable story of Amazon survival.
It’s the story about how a distraught mother, some benevolent locals, Facebook, a beer company,
and one truly stubborn man can sometimes deliver a miracle.
Even before his 2012 incident in the Amazon, Davey du Plessis had always been an adventurer.
The year prior, he’d cycled nine-thousand miles down the East Coast of Africa, from
Cairo in Egypt to Ballito in South Africa, over the course of one hundred and twenty
days.
Plessis, a humanitarian at heart, devoted this feat of human endurance to Habitat for
Humanity.
The sponsorship dues from the project raised enough funds to create a house for an underprivileged
family in Tanzania.
For most people, this would be enough of a lifetime achievement to take it easy from
then on.
But, in many respects, Davey du Plessis is not “most people.”
He immediately began planning his 2012 mission, “Project Amazon.”
According to Davey’s personal website, it was intended to be an unsupported solo-mission
down the Amazon River, travelling over 6,700 miles over the course of five months.
Davey would begin at the river’s source – way up in the Peruvian Andes – and would
terminate at the river’s mouth: Brazil’s coastline to the Atlantic Ocean.
Davey planned on achieving this route with a combination of paddling, cycling, and hiking.
Much like his trip across Africa, Davey’s new expedition was all about making a statement.
This time, he wanted to promote conservation and environmentally-conscious living.
He also teamed up with the group Adventurers & Scientists For Conservation, with whom he
intended to provide the data he collected along the way.
Davey wasn’t naïve, either.
He was prepared for many of the potential threats he could face in the Amazon.
When talking about planning for the experience, he said:
“[In] Africa, the fears were the big game.
The Amazon is a very different environment.
The fears came from the small creatures.”
Davey took extra precautions against poison arrow frogs, bullet ants, and candiru – The
Amazon River’s infamous, and supposedly urethra-invading, fish.
In theory, he’d accounted for almost everything.
He even said that, in the river itself, he made a firm commitment to not go any deeper
than his knees.
This was a project that started out with the purest of intentions.
He was self-sufficient, cooking his own meals and purifying rainwater to drink.
Davey would paddle for solid blocks of ten to twelve hours a day, even sleeping in his
kayak and allowing the river’s currents to keep him moving towards his destination.
At night, he’d establish base camps on the river’s edge and sleep, before getting back
up and doing it all again the next day.
He had a close call two weeks into his journey.
While washing a pot on the river’s edge, in complete jungle darkness, he felt something
slither around his leg.
He would later find out this was a baby anaconda – and remarked that it was perhaps the first
time the snake had ever seen a human being before.
As a hardcore animal-lover, Davey took it in stride.
An animal he encountered frequently was the Amazonian Fresh-Water River Dolphin.
Pods of these dolphins often trailed his kayak during his morning rowing for a couple miles.
In August, one of these dolphins even attempted to breach the bottom of his kayak.
This, Davey figured, was likely because a young, male dolphin during mating season had
mistaken his kayak for an eligible bachelorette.
He had pleasant encounters with local tribesmen, many of whom hadn’t ever met people from
outside the country, but were genial and welcoming nonetheless.
Two months had passed, and it seemed that everything was going according to plan.
However, 56 days into Davey’s trip, disaster struck.
Two men in a dug-out motorboat passed his kayak.
Davey brushed it off at first, as the boat pulled ahead and disappeared in front of him.
After all, plenty of locals worked the river.
Davey just carried on rowing.
Ten minutes later, Davey felt a sudden, intense impact on his back – a sensation he described
as being like a baseball bat slamming into you.
He fell from his boat, and began to sink.
Davey had been shot – and worse, the bullet had struck him in the spine, leaving him partially
paralysed from the waist up.
Inside his head, he was screaming at himself, “Swim!
Move!” but he just kept sinking into the murky depths of the river.
When he hit the bottom, he finally regained some movement in his lower body, and managed
to surface, disoriented and afraid.
He looked around, seeing nothing but his upturned kayak.
As he pushed himself back towards the boat, a second bullet blasted into the left side
of Davey’s face.
He managed to drag himself to the river bank, about fifteen feet away, and collapsed on
the water’s edge.
But Davey’s ordeal was far from over.
He felt another impact, this time in the right side of the face.
He’d been shot.
Again.
Puncturing his carotid artery, and spilling copious amounts of blood out into the river
below him.
It was in this moment that he truly realised how isolated he was here, and that the people
closest to him did not have his best interests at heart.
In this moment of pain and fear, he said to himself “This is it.
This is where you die.”
But, against all odds, he was wrong.
The motorboat he saw earlier sped towards him, containing only one of the men he’d
seen earlier.
Davey deduced that the other one had just been shooting him.
He rose shakily to his feet, and begged the second man for his life.
The man – an Amazon Pirate – was utterly indifferent.
He approached Davey, preparing to finish him off manually.
But Davey ran, powered by pure adrenaline, into the jungle.
The second unseen pirate fired off a fourth shot, and struck Davey in the leg as he fled.
But Davey kept running.
He ran for a solid couple miles, escaping the two pirates, but suddenly realising he
was injured, without supplies, and utterly alone.
He collapsed, once again figuring he was doomed.
He’d been shot twice in the face, once in the torso, and once in the leg.
For a couple minutes, he almost accepted it, and let himself slip away.
Suddenly, he found himself surging with a second burst of power.
In this moment, Davey decided that he had two choices: To lay down and die, or to get
up and live.
If he was going to survive this horrible incident, it would be all about choosing to live.
He kept going for another mile and a half, until he got tremendously lucky.
He came upon two tribesmen at a riverbank, and managed to get their attention.
They quickly attended to him, and brought him back to their community for treatment.
The tribe began making arrangements to have him transported to a hospital in the city
of Pucallpa, Peru, but this hospital was 24 hours away.
This tribe didn’t have the fuel to get him there.
However, they swaddled him with blankets, and resolved to take him to the next tribe
a few hours downriver.
They could help transport him on the next leg of his emergency journey.
For a torturous three hours, Davey waited in the bed of the boat – too weak to move
– while the two tribes brokered the deal.
They needed money to get him to the hospital, but Davey didn’t have any, on account of
just being robbed by bloodthirsty pirates.
Things were getting worse.
Davey’s organs were beginning to inflate, and he started to vomit blood.
His internal bleeding was so bad that he occasionally began to choke on the coagulated blood clots
making their way up his throat.
At this point, the boatmen of the new tribe realised any payment could wait until later,
and they began rushing Davey downriver.
The hospital was still twenty hours away.
However, these boatmen wouldn’t be the last in the massive, inter-communal act of collaboration
that saved Davey’s life.
He was dropped off twice more, in the middle of the forest, where two more communities
came and took him through the next portion of the journey.
Davey felt kind of like the baton at a relay race, but given the limited resources of these
altruistic communities, it was his best chance of staying alive.
It happened twice more before he reached the hospital in Pucallpa, where he had to endure
another six hours of waiting in limbo while the doctors attempted to identify him.
Davey called and spoke to his mother, who immediately took to Facebook, attempting to
find a local Spanish speaker who might be able to help save her son’s life.
And, amazingly, it worked.
Two men walked into the hospital, offering to help Davey after having heard his story
from his mother’s Facebook posts.
Were these men doctors?
Government officials?
No, they were representatives of South African Breweries, or SAB – a beer company from
Davey’s home country.
They immediately paid off the doctors, who gave Davey an X-Ray…which made them realise
they didn’t have the capacity to treat wounds this serious.
He’d need to be flown to a hospital in Lima, Peru’s capital.
Once again, the SAB men came to the rescue.
They booked him a spot on a commercial airline, where he was loaded onto a stretcher and tied
across four seats, traumatising surrounding commercial passengers.
Eventually, he did reach that hospital in Lima, and spent a month in the ICU.
Davey was told he’d been shot four times with a .22 calibre shotgun, and was immensely
lucky to be alive.
Buckshot had pierced his lungs, skull, windpipe, and heart.
The final piece of buckshot remains in his heart to this day, but he made a full recovery.
It had taken the combined forces of six whole communities, one terrified mother, two beer
company representatives, and doctors in two hospitals to undo the damage two armed men
had done in minutes.
But the result was successfully saving Davey du Plessis’ life, in a heart-warming example
of how the compassion of many can truly make a difference.
The incident hasn’t scared Davey away from adventuring.
He’s performed subsequent missions in Botswana, and continues to make a positive impact as
an author, activist, and motivational speaker.
There are certainly terrifying things hiding in the Amazon jungle, but Davey’s story
proves that there’s great kindness and beauty in there, too.
Thanks for watching this video from The Infographics Show.
If there’s anything we love here, it’s a story about people triumphing against all
odds.
Why not check out “I Was Trapped Underwater For Three Days” or, if you want more stories
from the Amazon, you can check out “She Fell 10,000 Feet and Survived 11 Days In The
Amazon Rainforest.”
Remember: Sometimes, you really can depend on the kindness of strangers.