White water rafting on the Nile

Posted 29 June, 2007 by Janette in Jinja

The grade 5 rapids are not optional. If you want to white water raft at Jinja, the source of the White Nile, it will include the roughest waters you can commercially navigate.

Neither Graham nor I have white water rafted before, but we gamely opt for the medium level of difficulty. Unfortunately for us, the rest of our group is experienced and wants to ‘go mad.’ So we become the mad-medium group. Great.

Our guides are local guys in their early twenties, all muscle and jokes. Their favorite schtick is to pretend they’ve only just started, and then don’t really know what they’re doing. At least we hope it’s just a schtick.

We make it through the first couple of rapids, and it’s quite good fun. As we approach the third, our guide turns serious. The water is low today, which makes this next grade 5 particularly dangerous. We’ll need to skirt the center to avoid the “G spot”. If we flip over here, it will be like getting stuck in a washing machine.

Sure enough, we flip as soon as we hit it, and I get sucked right into the spin cycle. I hold my breath for a few seconds, but my helmet has come down over my eyes, and I can’t tell how far I am from the surface or from the boat. I seem to just be going around in circles, and I start to panic. I flail and gulp water, exactly what you’re not supposed to do. An eternity later, I pop up downstream and gurgle for help. A kayaker comes and asks for my oar, which I realize I’ve been clinging to. I toss it aside and offer my hand instead. Not a great way to make friends with the safety staff, but I’m too exhausted to care.

This isn’t fun anymore. I want off this ride, but there are 7 more rapids to go.

We hit a couple more rapids before lunch, and I resolve to become one with the raft. I lose the skin off my fingers, but I never lose my grip.

We reach the ‘flat waters’ and snack on pineapples and ‘glucose biscuits’. Inevitably, a pineapple rind battle breaks out between rafts, which culminates in people being dragged overboard and dunked, as if we hadn’t already had enough of that today.

We have four rapids left, and we have resigned ourselves to being flipped and battered. My clinging-on-for-dear-life approach is working well enough.

The final rapid is a grade 6, which is too rough to commercially rapid. We steer into an eddy and get out of the raft. A couple of weeks before, another group didn’t make it out in time, and got chewed up by this rapid. Two of them are still in the hospital, too fragile to fly home.

We get back into the river for the second part of the rapid, which is a grade 5. This second part is divided into a further two subrapids. If we flip over before the second one, we are instructed to hold our breath for at least 20 seconds before we try for air. This is a nasty one.

We don’t even make it two seconds into the first subrapid before we’re tossed clear out of the boat. But before I panic this time, I notice that the waves I’m facing remind me of the waves I used to love in Southern California. I take the same approach as I did with the big waves that I couldn’t body surf, and hold my nose and squeeze my eyes shut. I get sucked into a jet stream, and shot through another couple of these waves. I end up 80m away, and manage to climb on to a rocky island and wait for help. The safety kayakers have quite a few bodies to collect before they get to me. I’m relieved to see Graham with a smile on his face, and even more relieved that this ridiculous rafting is over!

We head back to camp to enjoy a BBQ, trade war stories, and compare injuries. We watch a video of the day later, and we could swear that those guides were tipping us over so that they could dance on top of the overturned raft for the cameras!

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King of the Gorilla Nest

Posted 22 June, 2007 by Janette in Rwanda

A 6am start on a cold and soggy morning. The drive to the entrance of Volcano National Park is like riding a bucking bronco.

We park, and tromp through fields of cabbage, “Irish potatoes”, squash, and other assorted vegetables. We pass a field of pyrethrum (a type of chrysanthemum) which will be shipped off to America to extract pyrethrin, which will then be sprayed on mosquito nets and clothing to protect the tourists that visit places like this. The fields are edged with eucalyptus trees and bamboo. Globalization has hit the farms of Rwanda.

It’s a 2 hour hike up steep, muddy slopes to see the Amohoro family of gorillas. Our guide knows exactly where the family is, because they are accompained at all times by heavily-armed trackers, who protect them from poachers. As we approach, our guide starts making a deep throated “harrump-humph-humph” sound, which is meant to imitate the gorilla’s way of saying everything’s cool.

We carefully pick our way down a very sleep slope, knowing that if we slip, we’ll roll right into the middle of the gorilla’s “nest”, which wouldn’t be welcomed by the silverback staring at us warily. This is in stark contrast to the juveniles’ way of navigating the hill - head-first somersaults!

This family isn’t very interactive with us, but they have two very playful young, who spend their time playing king of the hill and knocking each other down with their feet. A teenager charges us, and the guide makes us pick our way back up the hill very quickly. The silverback ignores us, focussing on the large amount of vegetation he needs to eat to maintain his enormous size. A mother and son chew lazily on a root, picking at each other’s fur. All is well in gorilla-land.

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Gorillas

Posted 22 June, 2007 by Graham in Rwanda

A short drive after a 5:30am start, and we got to Park National Volcans, in Eastern Rwanda.
We trekked for a little over two hours to meet up with the park’s trakers, who have been following a group of 16 mountain gorillas. This is where Diane Fossey worked and is buried. The organisation with her name is still very active here.
As we drove up it got very misty. The main crops up here are potatoes (Irish Potatoes, they call them) and cabbage. Not what I expected for Africa!
We gathered in the rain and mist for a briefing with our guide and headed into the park. This is a serious rain forest; very very damp, muddy, vines everywhere, and the whole thing envelopped in a thick mist. Magnificent.
We caught up with the trakers, then hacked our way into the bush, slid down a huge hill, and there they were: mountain gorillas!
There’s a large silverback - the dominant male - many females and juveniles. The kids were the most fun. They played ‘king of the hill’ on a pile of vegetation the silverback had ripped up. Once of them danced and beat his chest in glee. I think they were happy to see us. Each gorilla family only gets visited once a day by a group of 8 for a maximum of 1 hour. Hence after our hour we scrabbled back up the hill, onto the muddy path, and slid back out of the park. Wonderful!

This evening we are going to someone’s house here in Ruhengeri for a Rwandan meal and a talk about the 1994 genocide. But first someone on our truck has just got news he passed his degree, with a 1st, so celebrations are in order.

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Meeting the Batwas

Posted 21 June, 2007 by Janette in Rwanda

Children swarm the matatu as we arrive at the Batwa village. These are the oldest recorded inhabitants of the Great Lakes region of central Africa.

The Batwa people, also known as Pygmies, have lived here for millenia as hunter gatherers. They have recently been forced out of the forest, because the other primates in the forest (gorillas and golden monkeys) are Rwanda’s strongest tourism draw.

The Batwa chief leads a group of 12 in a traditional song and dance. I’ve always hated the idea of the natives being trotted out to dance for the Europeans, but the beauty of the songs is deeply moving. And the lady elder with the maraca is immersed in the joy of the music.

The chief then lets us peak into a few of the homes. They are mud huts, and they smell of damp earth, wood smoke, and the eucalyptus leaves that they use to cushion their beds. Families with up to seven children live in each hut, which is smaller than a western double bedroom. (One wonders why they don’t stop at 2 or 3 children.)

The children are delighted to have their pictures taken and then see themselves on the LCD screen of the digital cameras. Soon my camera is taken over by a teenage boy, who turns the tables and starts taking pictures of us mizungus. At first his pictures are haphazard and off-center. But after taking several shots and checking the results, he takes a perfectly composed shot of one of the villagers who refused to let us outsiders photograph her.

This tribe used to have a male chief, but he drank away all of the village’s money. They’ve since elected a female chief, who leads the dancers. When the Batwa were forced out of the forest, they were not given enough land to farm to sustain themselves, so they now rely heavily on these tourist visits for income.

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Rwanda

Posted 21 June, 2007 by Graham in Rwanda

We spent our second night on the trip camping by lake Bunyoni. It is the deepest and (I think) highest lake in Uganda. Idi Amin used to have his holiday home there. Now he’s gone and it’s a very nice place indeed.
The next morning we took a boat over to the other side of the lake to rendez-vous with the truck. Then we drove through the mountains to the Rwandan border. The drive was stunning, and very very bumpy.
We crossed into Rwanda at a very small border post with no hassle. Uganda was mostly mud roads, so it was pleasant to find tarmac in Rwanda.
So far it seems more prosperous than Uganda whereas I expected the opposite. Apparently this is because Ruhengeri is the only part tourists ever visit, to go gorilla tracking (we go tomorrow), so there is lots of ‘gorilla money’ around.

Today we visited the Batwa people (the ones dancing in the pictures), sometimes also called pygmies even though they are not very small. They were hunter / gatherers until very recently until the government re-settlement them as subsitence farmers. They are not yet all that keen on it. They danced and sang for us, great music and dancing. They we poked our noses round their village whilst the kids stared at us and pointed.
Janette lent her camera to one of them who took really good pictures with it.
Then off to the banana beer brewers and a stroll through some jungle. Make sure you check the photos on our Flickrs.

Tomorrow we go gorilla trekking!!

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