Durban - The worried mother of solo adventurer Davey du Plessis was expected to leave SA for Latin America this morning to be with her son, who remains in the intensive care unit of a Peru hospital. Du Plessis was shot while kayaking on the Amazon River.
Robyn Spence Wolff, of Mount Edgecombe, had hardly slept since hearing of her 24-year-old son’s ordeal at the weekend, her partner, MJ Odendaal, said yesterday.
“It will be great for her and Davey to reunite,” he said. “She hasn’t rested much since she heard the news. She plans to wait for him to recover and for the doctors to give him the all-clear to travel… to bring him back to Durban.”
Odendaal, a jockey who is well known in racing circles, had funded and supported Du Plessis’s trip to the Amazon.
Du Plessis, who was born in Cape Town and schooled in Durban, has been in Latin America since June. He was on the third stage of his source-to-sea journey, which he began in the Peruvian Andes Mountains and was to finish on the Brazilian Atlantic coastline.
He was shot several times by two tribesmen while kayaking, and robbed of his clothes and equipment.
Bullet fragments are still lodged in various parts of his body, including his skull, face, neck, arms and leg.
Spence Wolff had said her son ran 5km through the jungle with a punctured lung after being shot.
He came across other jungle inhabitants, who apparently took the wounded man in a motorised canoe to a tribe that helped him.
In a posting on her son’s Facebook page, “World Wonderer - The Amazon”, Spence Wolff said her son had lost a lot of blood, and the people who had helped him put him on an IV drip to rehydrate him, before sending him on a boat further down river to a hospital in Pucallpa.
Odendaal said the family were waiting for the results of Du Plessis’s scans.
The adventurer’s father, Louis Wolff, arrived in Lima on Monday and has been liaising with the doctor.
Spence Wolff has promised to keep well-wishers posted on her son’s condition through his Facebook page.
The Mercury