WHITEWATER TOURISTS - There and Back Again

Horizon line coming up. Break out, peer over. Two drops. Kiwi Rob is below signalling a simple line down the right. Break back in, boof drop #1 hard against the wall. Dammit, too far right! The boat rebounds off rock and loops back into the maw of the hole. A scrappy struggle ensues, finally resolved through the medium of reaching blindly for a handhold and dragging myself out. Problem, there's now no way to get the line on drop #2. A blind plunge on the left, the Method Hair finds deep water but the pilot crunches sickeningly onto a sharp reef. I eddy out clutching my chest and gasping for air. The other three are convulsed with tears of laughter, having sadistically relished the free sideshow. Ten minutes into Ecuador's Rio Papallacta, and I've already busted a rib. Jeez, this is the boulder filled ditch from hell. I glance up the steep valley sides, contemplating trekking out to the road through the rainforest. The idea of clambering through knee-deep mud hacking at creepers whilst swatting aside tarantulas and ewoks is not appealing. Guess I'll just have to paddle on and try to blank out the pain. I reflect for a moment and get things in perspective. It could be worse. It could be far, far worse. I could be at work.

Rio Papallacta, Ecuador.

At the end of eight month's of fulltime boating, our final destination was going to have to churn out something special. Si and I needn't have worried; Ecuador was a blinding finish. A hundred word summary of the country:

What Ecuador is not…A roughty-toughty expedition destination. It has an excellent guidebook, great food and hotels and our American cousins have been boating there for years. What Ecuador is…The Land of a Thousand Boofs. The most possible quality boating, from big play rivers to hairy creeks, in the smallest possible area, with the least possible inconvenience. Taxi drivers run shuttle and your only effort expended will be on the river. Chris Wheeler flew in to join us for only 14 days and boated for…14 days. But then, he's a maniac. That's all the info you get, now read the guidebook…www.smallworldadventures.com.

How can we even begin to sum up the trip of a lifetime? For want of a better means, here are a few random rambling notes, hopefully giving a brief flavour of our trip…

Gettin' Sorted.

…was a full time job, tacked onto our part time day jobs. Scrawling letters to potential sponsors, poring over maps, trawling the Internet for river info, applying for visas, making telephone calls to harass airline officials, fiddling with gear. It all had to be sorted before we took that first flight, and mostly, it was. Si's employers said yes to the trip, mine said…no. Collecting my P45 before setting off made the trip committing if nothing else!

Plenty of nice people helped us out...

All the Gear, No Idea.

We took some great kit along which we just can't praise enough. Seriously, this stuff often made the difference between a chilled out surf on the river and an extended epic. We thought long and hard about our choice of kayak and thankfully, picked a beaut. Our Method Airs had 'versatile' printed across them in bold capitals; in just the first week we lugged the boats down a 200 mile remote expedition trip and emptied the kit out on the bank to throw blunts in between the hairy stuff! Gorilla paddles were just the job for our abuse-heavy paddling style and also made great reserve tent poles after the 'Night of the Gale' in New Zealand! After subbing deep and long under the Mother Of All Stoppers™ during a flood run on the Futaleufu's Inferno Canyon, I for one said a silent prayer of thanks to Playboater for their fantastic Workdeck. We owe the guys at Kogg a few drams for their brilliant clothing which is presumably made from Kryptonite; incredibly, not one item of their kit showed any wear or tear after around 160 days on the river. Their river shorts were our overall favourite gear; we even took them off to wash them every three months or so.

Karamea River, NZ.

Ooh ooh. Ooh ooh Staying Alive!

Personal Longevity was fairly high on our trip priority list, not least because we're nobody's idea of kayaking superstars and just as mortal as the next stopperbait. We made a few mistakes in this respect, not least starting off in India's monsoon where a usual day's paddling merrily featured 'taunting the Reaper' as a matter of course. Oddly, our three swims of the trip all happened in the place we knew best; Nepal. I guess we just over-relaxed in the sun, blue water and soaring peaks. Inspecting that river-wide walled-in pourover on the Modi Khola might have reduced our swim total by two, though.

'Oh my God I'm going to die today...or tomorrow at the latest...' - monsoon boating in India.

This Way, That Way, Forwards, Backwards.

Getting around was an epic adventure in itself, frequently rivalling the paddling for entertainment and challenge. Blagging the kayaks onto planes for free was a doddle next to hitching lifts with amphetamine- dosed Sikh truckers, negotiating rates with drunken porters and cramming the kit into the heaving mass of humanity that is the Delhi to Bombay Express. Leaving Asia, travel became less of an ordeal and more of a way of life. Simon's attempt to skid off the edge whilst admiring the scenery of the Rangitata Valley was the only 'blip' in a classic Kiwi 'Road Trip' experience. Do it now, it's a hoot…you'll find that there is a whole subculture of similar kayak wasters driving around NZ living from similarly trashed cars. Chile, you'll know from Geography lessons, is long. Very long. A sturdy vehicle is essential for getting out of the airport, let alone hitting the huge rivers of the south. At one point, five UK and two random Argentinian boaters were living from our humongous hired Pickup, it beat a motor home any day. The journey north from Chile to Ecuador was only for true aficionados…ninety hours on the bus discussing whether the endless succession of Steven Seagal movies were any better before being dubbed. Ecuador is shuttle heaven, as mentioned above. The only downside is when its your turn to ride inside the taxi cab and suffer Rodriguez's impromptu English/ Spanish lessons…You'll know when it happens to you.

At the top of another ridiculuosly high pass in India, waiing for the bus to be fixed...again.

Here, There and Everywhere.

Ours was as much a 'World Tour' as paddling the Tryweryn is a 'UK Tour'. For every river we ran, there are umpteen more waiting up the road that we never got to. No worries, we have the rest of our lives to catch up on them! It was a privilege to merely scrape the surface and sample some stunning boating experiences in awesome places. Launching into the Tsarap surrounded by blazing hot Himalayan desert at 14500 feet. Sliding up the twenty foot face of a wave on Hakapur Rapid in the monsoon. Achieving momentary weightless off Maruia Falls. Watching Si run a mega-rapid on the Maipo I'd dismissed as impossible, with something approaching style. Swatting tiny hummingbirds and giant butterflies from our path on the superlative Jondachi creek. Excuse us if we get all misty-eyed reminiscing…

Madi Khola, Nepal.

River Bums.

Ooh yes, we'll be off boating again. But we now have plenty of folk to do it with. We paddled with no end of fantastic people who accepted us instantly as friends merely because of what we had on our roof rack! Early in our trip, we harboured the illusion (and tried to convince sponsors) that what we were doing was in some way special. Nope, the world appears to be stuffed full of paddlers doing precisely the same thing; the 'World Tour' appears to be an ongoing thing, a baton passed on from one group to another and constantly circling the world from river to river. Drubha is in now Kathmandu, Helen is competing in the Worlds in Spain, Diz n' Eric are in the Rockies, Jonno is on the Zambezi, Emma and Marc are in Canada and Tim is in…Yorkshire! The list goes on, but suffice to say we had never realised what an International community boating is. Cheers to all these people and many more for making our trip so good, but it hasn't even begun; we'll be catching up with you all again, soon as the overdraft is paid off!

Mark Rainsley (help with long words from Simon Wiles).

Kaituna River, NZ.