Rafting – Part 2

June 7th, 2009 by Elizabeth Kruithof

Namaste from the pouring rain in Pokhara,

Rafting – day 2:

I was the first one up in the morning, so I made a cup of milk tea and sat on a rock by the river…thinking about where I was and how I wouldn’t have imagined myself here in the not so distant past. It started raining so hard that we huddled under the tarp attached to the raft propped on its side to eat breakfast (porridge, toast, eggs, fried veg, hashbrowns…way too much food!). We waited out the rain and then broke down camp, washed all the dishes in water so dirty it almost seemed a laughable exercise, and loaded up the raft. We rafted down the river for a long time, regularly bouncing through good sets of rapids, stopping under a waterfall and having a monsoon rain down on us, and eventually getting quite cold (paddling at the front getting doused with cold white water coming over the bow with no sun out and a breeze blowing). By the time we stopped on the river bank for lunch, I would have given anything for the hot Nepali sun to break through the clouds and dry my soaked body…and amazingly enough, it did. And the sun stayed with us, burning in the sky, for the rest of the day. After lunch we paddled through rapids after rapids and watched the safety kayakers flip and toss and do tricks through them. I was loving the sunshine. We pulled up at our campsite and brought everthing out to dry in the hot rays. We were near a village hidden at the top of the hills, so there were children and a dog who’d come down to the beach to check us out. I went to the bathroom, which was a blue tarp held up between two paddles in front of a dug out charpi hole in the sand, and the sand gave way under my right leg and my foot slid in to the charpi. The fact that this didn’t phase me in the slightest (actually it made me chuckle at myself) is a testament to just one of the ways in which Nepal has changed me for the better. We had veggie soup, prawn crackers, and a very late dhal bhaat, after which Amanda and I crashed in to our tent after a long day of paddling, good food, and good company.

Rafting – day 3:

During the night I woke up to water dripping through the roof of the tent on to my cotton sleeping liner, with the rain and wind hammering our flimsy two-pole tent. There were flashes of lightning and thunder outside our door that didn’t really zip up. I rolled off the hard foam mattress, on to the floor of the tent, and covered myself with the mattress so I couldn’t feel the water dripping down on me. And you know what? The rain and the fact is was coming through our tent didn’t get me down…Brandin wouldn’t even believe that unless he saw it with his own two eyes. In the morning the kayakers were making breakfast with soaked and sandy gear surrounding them. We packed up all our stuff and had another huge breakfast of cornflakes (soaked in my milk tea), museli, crepes with honey, toast with peanut butter, and boiled eggs. Our rafting guide (a 3 toothed man who we’re pretty sure had too much ruksi – homebrewed Nepali liquor that smells just like turpentine – last night) snapped at us to hurry up and get everything down to the raft. The older safety kayaker with the very kind face and killer body (ha!) told me I could go in the kayak after the rapids today, since he knew I’d wanted to do kayaking but couldn’t afford it. Off we went in to the river, crashing through a few sets of rapids before hitting the flat water we’d be riding the rest of the way to the take-out point. I pulled on his kayak skirt, jumped in the river kayak, and shoved off the side of the raft in to the river. I paddled the rest of the way in front of the raft with the younger safety kayaker. The river ran through high hills on either side covered in lush, green jungle. We finished our trip where the Kali Gandaki meets a thick, caramel coloured river just above where a dam sits. We carried the kayaks up the rocky path to where the van was waiting for us (SO heavy…and the younger kayaker carried up his on his shoulder while also carrying the front end of mine!). After hauling all the gear up to the van we had a picnic lunch with the goats cruising around waiting for our leftover coleslaw. It was a long, winding ride back to Pokhara, listening to both Nepali music and “Quit playing games with my heart” by the BSB (the first song I could actually sing along to!) Once back at the Adrenaline Rush office, we followed the 3-toothed guide to his suggestion for a cheap guesthouse, which Amanda was convinced was otherwise used as a brothel (and I’m pretty sure she was right). We were supposed to take the 3 guys out for dinner to say thanks for the trip and goodbye, but only 3-tooth showed up (kind of drunk, a bit snappy, and always creepy). We were sure he never even invited the two kayakers, which were the ones we really wanted to thank…so we were quite peeved at him. We left as soon as we could after dinner, bought some chocolate, and went back to the “guesthouse”.

After a bit of a scare that creepy 3-tooth was going to come up to our room in the night, Laura, Amanda and I packed up in the morning and went across the road for a quick breakfast. Despite our efforts, 3-tooth managed to find us and then tried to rip us off on a taxi to the bus park. Slimy tool. Once we got to the bus park with all our stuff we found out that there was a bandha (strike) and that no buses would be going from Pokhara to Kathmandu (or to Dumre, where we needed to go to get to Bandipur where we were going to spend a night to finish off the trip). We booked two rooms in another guest house where the rooms were atually really nice and still pretty cheap. We all had to laugh at the fact that we measured the luxury of the room by the fact that it actually had a toilet that flushed (your standards change in a third world country, I guess). We all went to hang out in the shade, have tea, and read in the beatiful garden by the lakeside behind my favourite ‘German’ bakery. At a cheap sandwich joint, I discovered an ice coffee milkshake that, as far as I’m concerned, was superior to any Tim Horton’s iced capp. We shopped around lakeside for a while, spending some time chatting with a young Indian guy working at a jewelry shop…trying to convince him to give us precious gems (Laura got him to make a silver ring for her with the ‘gem’ being a baby tooth lost from one of the children at her orphanage….only someone like Laura could possibly pull this off). We went out to dinner and I ordered the ‘Rainbow Special Salad’, which actually turned out much less sketchy than it sounds. I went back to the guesthouse to lie in the very comfy bed in the heat of the night and started to read my book.