Overlanders in Brazil held by Pirates

cj-10

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Sorry the whole story showed up for me and I do not subscribe. Thanks rruff for the other links

PORTO DOS DIAS, Brazil—In October 2012, Adam and Emily Harteau, a California couple in their early 30s, set out on an overland journey to the southernmost tip of South America in their Volkswagen Westfalia camper van. With colorful travel photos, $16,301 raised on Kickstarter, and the hashtag #vanlife, they drew an army of social-media followers intrigued by their seemingly blissful existence.

“As we grow older, time is punctuated by appointments and alarm clocks, and we forget how to live at our own pace,” Ms. Harteau wrote in a photo essay published in the New York Times’ travel section in August, nearly five years into what was initially planned as a yearlong trip. “We wanted to slow down time again by raising a family on the road and use their questions about nature and life as our curriculum. We are world-schooling our kids.”
Adam Harteau, right, Emily Harteau, left, and their two daughters arriving at the international airport in Belém in Brazil’s Para state on Nov. 2. The California family had been missing for days after pirates attacked their boat in the Amazon River delta area.
Adam Harteau, right, Emily Harteau, left, and their two daughters arriving at the international airport in Belém in Brazil’s Para state on Nov. 2. The California family had been missing for days after pirates attacked their boat in the Amazon River delta area. Photo: Marcelo Lelis/Associated Press

The Harteaus’ adventure came to a harrowing end on Nov. 1, when a ferry captain plucked the couple and their two daughters, 6-year-old Colette and 3-year-old Sierra, from a river in Pará state in the Brazilian Amazon. They had spent the previous three days hiding in the jungle after pirates in a wooden canoe ambushed the barge carrying them upriver on their return journey to California.

“They were very, very scared, hungry and covered by insect bites,” said Dinei dos Santos, the boat’s manager, who spotted them signaling for help.

The couple didn’t respond to interview requests. The tale of their escape and subsequent rescue was pieced together from their statements to police and accounts from locals in the remote area where they were rescued.

The band of a half-dozen armed pirates surrounded and took control of the vessel Andorinha, or Sparrow on Oct. 29, brought the vessel ashore and confined the Harteaus and the crew in a tugboat. After several hours being held hostage and intermittently threatened at gunpoint, the family decided to make a run for it.

In the middle of the night, as the robbers were apparently busy off-loading cargo from the hijacked barge, Mr. Harteau grabbed a survival kit and his surfboard from the Westfalia and slipped into the Jacaré Grande River with his family.

Using the surfboard as a float, the family of four swam a mile and a half to the opposite bank of the river. From there they bushwhacked about 6 miles over the next three days through the jungle racked by fierce thunderstorms and teeming with jaguars, anacondas, caimans and a host of venomous spiders and snakes. They hid from passersby, fearing they might have ties to the pirates.

Exhausted and hungry on their fourth day in the wild, Mr. Harteau finally pushed his family on the surfboard toward Mr. dos Santos’s ferry. He was filling out his ship’s log in the cabin as the sun set when he heard shouts and saw hands waving frantically from the choppy waters of the river.
A school boat at Porto dos Dias village, where the barge went after the pirates left.
A school boat at Porto dos Dias village, where the barge went after the pirates left. Photo: Paulo Trevisani/The Wall Street Journal

News that the Americans were missing had surfaced the day before, when the U.S. Embassy notified family members in California. Ms. Harteau’s father, Warren Brandle, a family doctor in the Sacramento area, read vastly conflicting accounts of their fate on Brazilian websites, including reports that the family had been kidnapped and that they had jumped into the river. Adding to the mystery was the fact that the Andorinha’s crew members were aboard the barge when the police arrived, by which time the pirates had absconded.

“I thought they were dead,” said Ieda Dias, a 56-year-old nurse in the nearby village of Porto dos Dias, where she first got word of the missing family. “Nobody swims in these waters.”

But when Mr. dos Santos saw the two children on top of a surfboard and their parents in the water, he said he instantly knew it was the Americans he had heard about in the news.

“They climbed onboard and rushed to a corner,” the 30-year-old ferryman said. “I think they only wanted to feel safe.”

Crew members and other passengers on Mr. dos Santos’s ferry gave the family clothes to replace their tattered garments and fed them a typical Brazilian meal of rice, beans and beef.

The Harteaus were taken to the river town of Breves, where they spent nearly 24 hours in a local hospital. Mr. Harteau was treated for a mild allergic reaction; Ms. Harteau had sunstroke and a leg injury from a previous accident; and their daughters were treated for fever, dehydration, insect bites and sunstroke.

In an Instagram post on Sunday, the Harteaus posed with their olive-green surfboard and Brazilian authorities in front of a single-propeller airplane.

“We couldn’t be more ecstatic to say that WE ARE ALIVE,” the family declared to 132,000 followers. “We are so grateful for all of your well wishes in these difficult times and want to relay our love for Brazil, which remains even after the hell we survived.”

Authorities say piracy and drug trafficking are rampant in the Amazon, a forest the size of Western Europe where roads are nearly nonexistent and rivers provide the only means of transportation for people and cargo. In Pará state alone, police registered 641 pirate attacks from 2011 through last month, with many others thought to have never been reported.

The Harteaus’ travail was the second instance in little more than a month of foreign tourists being ambushed by pirates in the wild reaches of the Brazilian Amazon, highlighting what many say is an intractable threat in a region where human settlements are few and far between and law enforcement scarcer still.
Police say these footprints were left by the Harteaus as they wandered into the forest by the Cumuru River.
Police say these footprints were left by the Harteaus as they wandered into the forest by the Cumuru River. Photo: Para State Police

In September, police said 43-year-old Emma Kelty, a British teacher, was murdered by a gang known as Water Rats while kayaking on the Solimões River, in neighboring Amazonas state.

“The area is huge, and we don’t have resources to monitor it all,” said Rilmar Firmino, police chief in Pará, a state twice the size of Texas, where the Harteaus were found. “You’ll travel the whole day and see no police at all.”

Boat operators, often mom-and-pop businesses struggling to stay afloat, are ill-equipped to stave off the marauders. “If I hire security guards, I can’t make money,” said Altair Ferreira da Silva, the Andorinha’s owner.

Further complicating matters, police say pirates are sometimes abetted by riverside communities, where residents live in flimsy wooden houses on stilts, have little income and are happy to buy cut-rate merchandise. Most of the cargo that was stolen from the Andorinha comprised boxes of clothes and manioc flour, a local staple. Local police said on Tuesday that one suspect had been arrested.

Raimundo Luiz, a 37-year-old grocery trader in the village of Curumu, near the port where the pirates unloaded their booty, expressed a feeling of helplessness.

“If someone comes here and I know he’s a pirate, what can I do?” he said as his six-year-old granddaughter played on his kitchen floor. “There are no police here to protect us.”
 
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