Whitewater on the Zambezi!
Let me just start by saying I’ve been white water rafting before. Several times actually, maybe half a dozen. Some meandering, some exhilerating, one with members of my family bailing their boat into mine. One recently with a family who was massively overweight, couldn’t swim, and couldn’t balance to save their lives. The dad fell overboard getting in the boat, and managed to fall out several other times without the aid of any whitewater. But I digress.
You know you are not in Kansas (or Colorado) whitewater anymore when the rafting guides informs you that there will be four rescue kayakers with you to pick up the human detrius that gets knocked out of the raft.
Its cold in the mornings in Zambia, and still chilly in the open aired safari vehicle that gets us to the top of the river bank, which we then have to hike down. I have to say, they aren’t kidding when they say that the hike down is the hardest part. It is a good 15 or 20 minutes straight down the gorge. They have a rickety set of tree-branched latticework down some of the steepest part, which adds a little more danger and excitement to the descent.
Our raft set sail with half of my group of friends (the other half in another raft) all suited up in full helmets and lifevests wrapped tight enough to cause hairline rib fractures. Not 2 minutes into the ride, as we are practicing in a relatively calm little pool, Vinny our guide tells half of us to get out of the boat!!! brrrrrr. Then the other half! We are practicing rescuing and pulling our fellow man into the raft. The bad part is that it was a good way to start off cold. The good part is that already wet, you couldn’t get any wetter if you fell in now. And semi comforting that we all now knew how to get someone out of the water quickly, but semi alarming that it was obviously imminently going to happen.
So off we went through our first set of rapids. Justin, who was up in front of the boat, tossed in after the first couple of boat rockings… it was like one second he was there, and then he was gone…and we couldn’t see him! He was under the boat and quickly surfaced and we got some practice pulling him in. Methinks he wasn’t taking it seriously (as many an 18 year old might not!), but after that little scare he was a bit more alert about this! (and he managed to stay in the raft for the rest of the rapids).
As we glanced back on the first set of rapids we saw an entire raft flip. Its very dramatic to see, oars all over the place, little bobbing helmets up and down in the water getting swept away with the waves dunking them every few seconds. We rescued a guy that was swept way down the river as well as a couple of oars.
Because it is high water season we actually all have to get off after the 10th named rapid because it is considered toooo dangerous for us for numbers 11 through 15. The only thing is, we are climbing up a rocky cliff, all wet, holding an oar and in non climbing shoes. I jumped around pretty well, but I have to say, the climb around up and down the cliff was pretty dangerous too, I felt more ill at ease doing this than the rest of the trip down the river, and I like to rock climb. Maybe not so much for myself, but if anyone fell it was going to be some serious injuries, and a lot of people weren’t cut out for grasping thin ridges of rock and balancing. I guess we all made it though and were back in our rafts 15 minutes later.
The rest of my fellow safari friends were in another boat that took an extremely dramatic front end flip on the rapid after we got into the boat. On video it was even more dramatic! We however, had managed to stay in our boat (for the most part, Justin keeling in not counting) so far. We were third in line to shoot down the following rapid. Boat number one, rowing along, looking good, looking good, then in an instant, total flippage, people all over the whirlpools. The boat following right after having seen that, looking serious, but looking good, looking good, looking… FLIPPED, and here we go! crap. I thought for sure we were going in, as this invisible flipping area (which didn’t look all that suspect, like some of the major rapids) had claimed two rafts in a matter of 30 seconds. BUT…We made it! Not sure how. Its like whatever reached out and flipped them had sunken under the water to play another day.
All in all it was a lot of fun… some major fun rapids, only one girl out of the 5 boats who looked like she seriously could have drowned as she was caught way upstream in a whirlpool, but the safety kayaker eventually dragged her panicked self to safety. It was a good day!
The following day, and the following after that were extremely sore days…. I mean like legs so sore that I didn’t walk right! Yes I’m getting old, but I’m not that old! Fortunately, Katie, who is 22 reported that she too felt like her legs were going to fall off.
Tags: Africa, Kayak, Livingstone, Southern Africa Tour, Whitewater Rafting, Zambezi River, Zambia, Tag Index
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