Stories from the Amazon - Sunken Canoe Adventure

I grew up in a family who lived and breathed adventure. I mean, who packs up their life and travels to a foreign country without knowing the language and goes to live with a Brazilian family who also doesn't speak English? And then go to the middle of the deep Amazon jungle and try to make contact with hostile native Indians?  You have to have ADVENTURE as your middle name to do that, maybe even as your first name! Growing up like that me and my brothers were always into crazy things and doing things that most people never would attempt. More of those stories later though.
This story is about one of our crazy, fun adventures we did for fun, not for life. My dad decided that it would be a good bonding thing to do a family fun adventure every year. Each year the adventure varied and was different but the goal was to create a memory and bond as a family. I'd say it definitely worked.
This particular year we decided that we'd like to kayak down this river called Rio das Garcas, or in English, Swan River. This was one of our favorite swimming rivers. It was an incredibly beautiful, smallish river (by Amazon standards). It went behind our farm  and I could ride my horse for about two or three hours through trails in the jungle to get to a lovely part of the river where there was a little old lady. (you can read that story in my blog post called Old Wives Tales). If you drove in the car you could get to another area of the river where there was a river beach and we liked to go there on Christmas day and enjoy the swimming and have our Christmas dinner at the beach.
Well, we thought it would be fun to start our trip by that beach and kayak downriver till we got to another swimming area miles down the river. There were three of us and only two kayaks. We had a nice proper fiberglass kayak and we had an inflatable kayak that sat two people. My brother was probably around 12 years old or so and we decided he could go in the fiberglass one and my dad and I would go in the inflatable one. We set off down the river, cooler with water and food in our inflatable boat. David, in the good kayak, was speeding all around us back and forth. Our kayak was very unbalanced and every time we'd get going fast it would start to spin in a circle. The going was very slow but the river was lovely and we were enjoying ourselves. Around lunchtime we decided it might be good to stop and eat our sandwiches and we saw a beach area by the side of the river. David went on ahead and had already pulled ashore. Dad was paddling our boat and I was in front keeping it going straight when all of a sudden I saw, lurking just under the water, a stump. I yelled and used the paddle to try and push the boat off the stump but we were going too fast and we went right on top of it and to our horror, POP, HISS, BUBBLE, BUBBLE, SINK!! We had to swim to the beach area dragging the flat kayak behind us. My brother was yelling and hopping up and down he was so mad. All I could do was laugh at the very unfortunate disaster we now found ourselves in. And it was pretty funny to see how mad my brother was too.
The beach was small and there was a very steep bank going up. Now we had to figure out how to get three people home in one small kayak. We climbed the bank and it looked very familiar to me. Sure enough, it was the little old lady's house who lived several hours horseback ride away from our farm. At least I knew where we were and we could walk home! We dragged both boats, paddles, cooler, swimming flippers, up that steep bank and ate our lunch. Then we got everything distributed between the three of us and started hiking back along the trail. David was huffing and ranting about our ruined kayak trip the whole hike back but I saw it as just part of the big adventure and since that was our plan in the first place, I felt like it was fun anyway. It took us all afternoon to hike all the boats back to civilization. We ended up going to a neighbor who had a road to his house. This neighbor also had a waterfall right by his house.  The neighbor had a truck and he drove us over to our farm, which was a few miles down the road. Somehow we were able to connect back with mom. Those neighbors laughed at us for a long time after that. The crazy American people who tried to float down a river in a blow up boat!