rafting the mighty zambezi

Imagine going down a log flume in a theme park. No. It’s nothing like that. Imagine you are astride an inflatable banana being flushed down the world’s biggest toilet. The green water hits you like the muscled arm of a sea god- you hang on by your toes and fingers to whatever comes to hand, and hang on and hang on- this thing is less of a wave and more of an underwater gale. But this isn’t a toilet or even the sea- it’s the mighty Zambezi- and you’re on a raft and you’re only on the second rapid- and there are over twenty more to come.

Two years ago I made a nine month trip by traditional birchbark canoe across Western Canada so making a nine day trip by raft would be quite a contrast. The biggest difference was that most of the time in Canada I was going against the current, towing, poling or paddling the canoe up into the headwaters of the Rocky Mountains. The raft trip, however, would be downhill all the way, down one of the most powerful rivers in the world, the Zambezi.

The mighty Zambezi, that divides Zimbabwe and Zambia, tumbles over the Victoria falls. Nearly 2km long it’s the planet’s largest single sheet of falling water easily dwarfing Niagra. For the next 120 kilometres this water is forced through a narrow gorge boiling up into the biggest sequence of grade 5 white water rapids in the world. As Koryn, our guide from the respected company Waterbynature, put it, “It’s the Everest of white water rafting”.

Zimbabwe used to be the center for rafting the Zambezi- now it’s Zambia. Thanks to Robert Mugabe’s extreme economic measures tourists are now coming in increasing numbers to the small town of Livingstone, named after it’s most famous visitor.

I spent a few days walking around. As in north Africa there was a marked difference in wealth between the new shopping mall, that has a Spar supermarket pretty much like one in the UK, and the ‘native’ shops where a new pair of sandals cost me only 90p. People were friendly and since Zambia has several competing languages English is widely spoken for general communication. 

The town museum had several of Livingstone’s original letters and a series of displays including a motorcycle once owned by former President Kuanda. After that I repaired to the excellent Jollyboys backpacker hostel/bar/general meeting place to contemplate a Mosi beer, which, I was quickly informed, the locals favour over the imported Castle brand. I then walked back to the luxurious Nyala Lodge where I stayed my first night. The Lodge was a few miles out of town and the sudden change from new buildings to shacks surrounded by mealie gardens was striking. A young man called Adam attached himself to me and said he was going down to the river to get work. It seemed the stray chance of portering rafts and luggage for tourists was the only job on offer. I had been told to watch out for elephants along this road. I asked Adam and he said that they only came at night.

I was a wildlife doubter until the first evening introductory ‘cruise’- a short river trip just above the falls on the flat wide section of the Zambezi. Just as I was sipping my second gin and tonic the helmsman gestured towards two swimming hippos. Zambia has Africa’s largest common hippo population, hippopotamus amphibious, reportedly something over 40,000 in number.  Almost immediately we then saw an elephant herd, about fifteen feet from the boat- swathed in three metre high reeds. African elephants have recently been divided into two species- these were the bolder and bigger Savanna elephant, africana loxodonta, rather than the shyer forest elephant found further North and West.

The next day we headed down to the river. There were six in the boat including me and our expedition leader, Koryn, a New Zealander with the arms of a powerlifter. He  handed out our 100% waterproof kitbags.  Tyler, the safety kayaker, instructed us on the art of using the camp toilet. True to its ecofriendly mission, waterbynature ships out everything- and I mean everything. Babyface, the Zambian cargo boat oarsman just smiled benignly and looked on

The first thing about paddling a raft is that you sit on the rubber edge of the raft and if you’re at the front you get to stick your right foot in a kind of pocket. Everyone else balances themselves and wedges their feet where they can make sure that if the raft goes over their shoe won’t actually be trapped. The gear was tied in with ropes and gear straps with a reassuring severity and thoroughness. We all had helmets and lifejackets, and though I normally wear neither on the more placid rivers I had paddled before, I was not about to say no out here.

In a birchbark canoe the outer skin is tree bark sewn with split pine roots and sealed with pitch or resin. That means you cannot afford to hot rocks, sticks or even ground out on sand. A lot of birchbark canoeing is spent nervously keeping away from stuff and if in doubt you walk the boat through any rapids. A rubber inflatable raft is the opposite. You can actually use rocks as something to bounce off and you need have no fear about descending rapids.

We caught a glimpse of mosi-oa-tunya, ‘the smoke that thunders” just before we set off. Livingstone wrote of the falls, “No one can imagine the beauty of the view from anything witnessed in England…scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight.” From river level the spay filled the canyon making the upper reaches invisible. The thundering noise was all around us. Koryn gave us some paddling lessons and then we were off, into a ripping current that pounded against the canyon wall before making a steep turn into ‘Morning Glory’, the first of many, crazily or aptly, named rapids. There was only one thing we had to do- backpaddle at the last minute to stop hitting the wall. If we hit we might flip.

Midstream we picked up the tremendous force of the river. I recalled the first rule about rapids- they are always twice as big when you’re in them than they look from above. Like the Duracell rabbit I paddled madly through the spray and I continued my mad paddling forwards when I should have heeded Koryn’s cry to stop and go in reverse. Oops- then BANG- we hit the wall- and bounced off. But mercifully no flip. Better listen harder next time.

Actually, the Zamebezi, though an incredibly powerful river, is relatively benign to people who make mistakes. There are flat stretches between the most horrendous rapids which allow you to escape. Though there are midstream rocks with ledges and underwater holes the river is not rife with them. But your best bet is a guide who hates flipping boats. Koryn, with fifteen years and over fifty rivers behind him, saw a flip as a professional disgrace. We also each had our bone Nyami Nyami river god lucky charms to wear around our necks. Since the building of the Kariba dam downstream, Zambians maintain that Nyami Nyami, the snake headed, fish bodied, river god has disappeared. We were rather hoping he hadn’t. The guides wore theirs too I noticed.

Each of the first ten rapids hit us quickly in succession. I swallowed lots of river, paddled into air as the raft crested waves, almost lost a foothold but didn’t, learnt to crouch low and look down as the biggest onslaughts of water inundated the craft. I took hasty sips of water in the noonday sun- despite the soakings the weather was hot- and though I seemed to be swallowing enough water to avoid dehydration I was taking no chances. The only wildlife I glimpsed between waves were taita falcons, hanging as if motioneless high above the canyon walls.

This first part of the river was in steep, black walled canyons full of pounding water. When we stopped to camp it was at a little sandy beach surrounded by scrub like dry savannah. The grass was brown since we were traveling in the dry season. In the rainy season the river rises so high it obliterates the rapids and is impossible to descend.

The second night, after a day of finally keeping my eyes open in the face of crashing wave rides, we sat around a fire on another deserted sandy beach. Dry grass, and short stunted trees with a few leaves grew up the hillside. There was a baobab with its great barrel skyward pointing branches like mad roots. Vervet monkeys, chlorocebus pygerythrus, or velvet monkeys as they are sometimes mispronounced, sat on a rock and watched us. It was very silent and very peaceful and it felt we had all come a very long way, though in fact it was about 21 km- nothing like an adventure to mess with your sense of time and space. And of course, despite a fair few warnings about the sense of drinking alcohol when you’re a)despite all precautions probably dehydrated and b)on the antimalarial malarone I did- and felt somewhat the worse for wear the next day.

There were no villages on the river, apart from some seasonally occupied huts that were empty when we passed. We did, quite often, see fisherman standing almost invisible on the rocks as we went by. They always waved – but only if we did first. At one point we had to portage the rafts- that is carry them around some especially bad rapids. In a birchbark canoe this is easy as it weighs very little- but two rafts and all the gear for ten people would have taken all day to shift if some helpful porters hadn’t turned up on the Zimbabwe side. For seven dollars each they carried everything.

At first we all pitched our tents at night but then the night sky was so bright it seemed a pity to be indoors. There were no mosquitoes at night so it was pleasant to just lie out and stare at the stars.

On day three we shot into the great foaming waves of Chumumba rapid and lost two people. The rapids were named by the pioneer rafters who made the first descent. Many of these rapids were shot by non-Africans- hence their English names- though not in Chumumba’s case. Koryn lined the raft up and then down the green tongue we went. For those new to the game the best line is usually somewhere at the end of the curving green water that slopes into the melee of waves below. The third wave seemed to go through us rather than over us. I felt myself going and thought unless I get a better grip I’m going overboard. Those further back had less to hold on to. Like eager seals I saw fellow rafters Andrew and Helen popping up out of the foam. The raft spun and they kept pace alongside through the massive turbulence. In quieter water we pulled them back aboard with much grunting and straining and pleasure that the river could, indeed, be survived by those falling in.

By now we had become a well integrated team, helped by four rafters being in the same family. Tony, a fit fifty year old had brought along his two sons Andrew and Phil and his niece Helen. The other rafter was Dan who had come “for the buzz of it.” He looked longingly at the super high bungee jump we went under at the start of the trip that hangs from the Zambesi bridge.

At night Koryn and Tyler made the surprising transformation into rather excellent chefs: steaks, curries, exotic deserts and delicate hors d’oevres- you name it they conjured it out of the cold chests and ammo boxes containing supplies. Compared to canoe trips I’d made where a top feed was a tin of sardines without a key this was great nosh indeed- it certainly made the challenge of the river more pleasant. Koryn said, “After my first trip I went and told mum sorry for never having helped out at home- I never realized what a never ending job it was!” “She said, “at least one man now knows.”

And so to Ghostrider. We’d heard about this rapid. Talked about it. Finally, after much portaging, paddling  and being pummeled by water we’d arrived. In a sense every rapid on the Zambezi is summed up by Ghostrider. It’s the longest biggest wildest most sustained wave train on the river. It’s also beyond the range of the short one and two day blasts down from Victoria Falls. And, if you fall in, it’s a long long swim.

I had shot rapids in a canoe but nothing like this. First it’s long. It just stretches on and on. And the waves are regularly spaced, like the humpy spine of some aquatic sea monster that is trying to buck you into oblivion. And they are high, several metres higher than ought to be allowed on a mere river. But a raft is a very forgiving boat. We butted and smashed our way along, hung on tight and lost no one. Was Ghostrider a pleasant experience? There were milder rapids that were more pleasant I’m sure. Ghostrider, however, was the experience..

The water flattened out and grew calmer. The terrain in the valley grew more wooded though it was still dry. Every so often we passed another baobab tree. On either we saw chacma baboons, papio ursinus, which, like hippos are underestimated for their ferocity. The chacma can weigh up to 40 kilos and can scare a leopard from attacking. Later we also saw the smaller yellow baboon, loping in troops along the dry forested foreshore.

We also began to see crocodiles. Some were the small, slender-snouted crocodylus cataphractus. But these were isolated populations. In the main we saw Nile crocodiles, some over twelve feet long. A crocodiles’s eyewidth in inches is roughly equal to their length in feet, and sometimes the eyes are all you can see.

And then came a surfeit of common hippos. The collective noun for hippos- is a subject of argument-  wallow, bloat or bevy, and plain pod are all acceptable. No one could agree even when we saw seven of them on a submerged rock (we’d thought they were the rock). Koryn sheered off towards the bank. The other raft took no chances and hugged the bank. If a hippotamus charges, for example if you separate it from its young, then the boat takes the impact as you scramble to shore.

Then, quite suddenly, after crossing a few minor ripples, we were at the Matetsi river and there was a chopper like something out of ‘Nam movie waiting on the gravel beach with its rotors going. The guides and gear had a five hour lorry trip through Zimbabwe. We had an incredible swooping half hour back up the 120 km we’d come, around the falls like Livingstone’ s angels, before touching down at the remote but luxurious Taita-Falcon lodge.

Stunned by the rapidity of our return to ‘real’ life we sat for an age on the clifftop verandah of the Taita-Falcon looking down at the rapids below. Looking at fast water is fascinating- especially when you’ve drunk a fair amount of it. Would I do it again? Maybe a different river, or maybe go up-river- now that would be a challenge. 

a new variety of experience

Anecdotal evidence is the procreative mulch of science. Aspirin came from folk remedies involving willow wood high in salicylic acid. Mould was known as a cure for certain infections before Fleming stumbled upon penicillin. Rumours of Milkmaids not getting small pox provided the clue to Edward Jenner to develop the smallpox vaccine. I’ve heard that bee keepers don’t get arthritis- so expect a major breakthrough in arthritis medicine after a thorough study of bee sting venom is made.

Anecdotal evidence is often confused with received wisdom. Received wisdom is often so general as to be wrong. Received wisdom suggested that objects fell at different rates depending on their weight. Gallileo showed that all objects, heavy or light, fall at the same rate. But received wisdom is not evidence- anecdotal or otherwise, it is just a commonly held generalization. Evidence is specific, and anecdotal evidence is specific, though scientifically unproven, information.

Anecdotal evidence isn’t always spot on. It isn’t always right- but so what? Mulch is for growing flowers, it’s not for display in its own right. The more mulch the better if your objective is discovery. If you find anecdotal evidence challenging then your faith in science is actually weak rather than strong.

But some anecdotal evidence can’t be measured easily. And just because something can’t be counted doesn’t mean it isn’t real. Science is all about counting things when you get down to the nitty gritty, not about saying what is real and what is not real.

Examples include things from your own experience that rely on your own lack of self-delusion and ego involvement to be useful. I call this experidence. It’s evidence, its proof, but it can’t be counted, it comes from experience.

Why would anyone else accept your experidence? Well, why do we listen to anyone? Because we are scared of them, because we respect them, because we like them, because what they say interests us and seems to chime in with our own experidence.

It’s easy to be deluded. After every early aikido lesson I downloaded my latest ‘secret of aikido’ to my friends in the local coffee shop where we met. It was all fantasy, or just words. I didn’t have enough experience to pass anything useful on. It was just ideas.

Experidence is not an idea or a hypothesis.

Experidence differs from ‘experience’ because experience is both something transitory such as experiencing a sandstorm and something durational that refers to having repeated something a lot. There is an implication of learning having occurred but we are all familiar with the man who speaks of his ‘twenty years of experience’ which means one year of mistakes repeated twenty times.

Experidence is never passed on wanting another to ‘believe it too’. You say it in a quietish voice more as an observation that anything else. You aren’t excited or even that eager to ‘pass on the idea’. Experidence can be hard won. After years of pounding away at trying to do several things at once I can safely say that experidence tells me that momentum is crucial to high productivity, and changing tack more than once a day massively reduces momentum. But I won’t argue about it; I don’t need to- I know it.

You know experidence in a different way to the way you know information. Experidence is not a skill though, it is a verbalization of something true, that cannot be counted, and relies on your own integrity for its value.

That’s why experidence is fragile. It needs not only an objective observer but a sincere one. We’re not talking sainthood here. A sincere enough one though, an objective enough one.

Experidence makes its big weight felt in its effect on judgment. That’s why judgment, to those too egodriven to notice, looks so mysterious. In fact with enough experidence you are bound to have good judgment.

To gain experidence you have to be open to it. ‘Open’ is the key word here- you have to be in the right state of mind to be optimally learning. This doesn’t mean imagining you are learning, it means being focused on what you are doing to a sufficient degree that self-consciousness is minimized. In that state you will observe fairly objectively what is really happening in any situation. From this observation you will get ideas of how to solve problems. These, if successful, provide the bedrock of experidence.

The best use of experidence is to be able to benefit from that of others. Get used to the quiet way it is usually passed on. There is no reason it can’t be shouted out but usually people just drop their real experidence into a conversation in a rather humble tone. Get used to taking it on board even if it makes no sense. Someone with a lot of traveling experience once said to me ‘there comes a point on every trip when you just have to trust’. This made no sense to me until I started traveling when I had to get things done on my trips. And it’s true- sometimes you just have to trust. Can’t be counted but it’s as real as scientific evidence. Experidence.

yet more on exploration

Swedish Explorer Mikael Strandberg recently asked me to write some words about what exploration means. Here is an expanded version of what I sent him.

Like the novel, which is supposed to be 'dead' as an artform, yet refuses to go away, so exploration is assumed to be all over, a thing of the past. 

I read that polar explorer Pen Hadow was, even after making the first solo unsupported trip to the North Pole, somewhat reluctant to call himself an explorer. You can see why. Ours is an age where the very word ‘explorer’ excites a hostile snigger, or, at best, an indulgent smile. In one of Haruki Murakami’s novels the hero meets a ‘TV explorer’, a superfluous nitwit with offroad vehicles and all the right clothing. He muses that since the world is all explored then only someone deluded would dare to call himself an explorer. It’s a widespread view- ESPECIALLY AMONGST PEOPLE WHO HAVE NEVER TRAVELLED IN REALLY REMOTE PLACES. Ours is the age of the instant internet know-all, the smartass with a smartphone, attitude and no experiences beyond the suburban. He’s watched a lot of telly though so he thinks that the telly view of the world is the correct one. But what about the places where the telly people never go? There are plenty.

It is quite simple, however, to say who an explorer was in the past- he was someone who went where others had not been and brought back information. That’s what most people will tell you, but in fact this is a modern definition, the scientific definition so to speak. If you look at explorers from Marco Polo to Richard Burton their actions are not so high minded: they were simply people who ‘tried to get places’. No more articulate than that really. They wanted to get to a new place by a new route, a shorter one usually. Their motives were usually economic. Or territorial- claiming land for their own country.

We forget all that now and teach in school that explorers were like modern scientists but in funny clothes. The fact that modern scientists, with aeroplanes and helicopters and skidoos and special clothing can go where any of these old explorers, who suffered such hardships, went, makes the scientists imagine they are cut from similar cloth. Not a bit of it.

The old explorers brought back news, information about things they found, rocks, plants, lost cities- but all this was by the by. They simply wanted to go somewhere no one had been before or get somewhere by a new route, a route no one else had used before. Or no one from their culture had used before.

Explorers are in fact the lineal descendants of those hunter gatherers who went in search of new game and plant rich areas. They were curious, flexible minded and courageous. Courageous because they were going outside the comfort zone of the tribe.

There is survival value in going outside the comfort zone- whether that zone is psychological or physical. It, is, in fact, what explorers do. They explore regions beyond the culture’s comfort zone. Captain Kirk, of course, summed it up rather well, “To boldly go where no man has gone before!” They may or may not bring back their discoveries in a form that is currently called ‘scientific’.

I used to find it odd that Buzz Aldrin in his space suit and tiny rocket capsule and Ranulph Fiennes making the first polar circumnavigation of the planet could both be labeled explorers. Yet they are: both have gone outside the comfort zone of the culture.

Maybe the journey involves an interior path too. Becoming initiated into a remote tribe counts as exploration- with both and internal and external journeying out of the usual comfort zone.

It is a slippery concept, exploration, especially in a world that many, wrongly, believe is fully explored. But what does ‘fully explored’ mean? That it has been photographed for Google earth? That someone has flown over it in a jet plane? That it was driven over in a jeep? We confuse map making with exploration. We have great maps of places that remain unexplored. I’ve used plenty of maps that are 50% fantasy or blank. Even ‘accurate’ maps won’t tell you whether humans have been this way before or not. My own view is that somewhere is not explored until a human being has looked at it closely and moved over it at walking pace. I have been in desert wadis where there are no vehicle tracks. The valley was unexplored- by any definiton- and I was the first person, since the previous wet period 5000 years ago - to visit such a place. That a car passed within two kilometres of this valley but didn’t see it and stop means nothing. They might just have well not have been there.

The other form exploration in the modern world takes, is to do an old route in a new way, or to link up several old routes. To do it using less gear and in a less complicated way counts as exploration- why? Because this is a more intimate way of experiencing the landscape. You find out new things about yourself. You necessarily leave the comfort zone. In the challenge, say, of towing a sledge solo to the North Pole in winter, you discover, because you are the first to sumount this challenge, a whole range of new solutions. That is the discovery element of this exploration.

Discovery without challenge- for example buzzing around Antarctica on snowmobiles looking for dinosaur bones- though fun is more science than exploration. When there is no challenge, physical or psychological, the results obtained don’t ‘change’ the discoverer. He hasn’t ‘earned them’ in the way an explorer has. I think we are drowning in information these days we haven’t earned.

do you hate goals?

In a self-help book I recently read: a goal is best viewed as 'a dream with a deadline'. It also stated that goal setting was more important than goal-getting. 

more exploration algebra

I've been thinking some more on why challenge is so important to a meaningful definition of exploration and why we still call polar athletes and adventurers 'explorers' (rightly it seems to me). I think it has something to do with the super abundance of information in the world. It's a cliche to say we are drowning in it, but we are. The average scientific paper is read by 1.2 people and I've met a few 0.2 people in my time. So on a basic publicity level, attaching challenges overcome to new information (the scientists who battle through the jungle to find a new species of tree frog) works. More than 1.2 people hear about your discovery because there is a human challenge story attached.

But I mean something more fundamental than that. I think we don't value things unless we have 'paid' for them in some way. It could be as simple as money, but often we pay with blood, sweat and time. Lots of time. Spending a lot of time on something you could do in an easier way (say chopper to the north pole) has some sort of virtue all its own in this overfast world. Doing things the hard way not only earns respect, it's a kind of down-payment on the things you do find out along the way. Learning the hard way makes the lesson stick. You change inside in some way. Your demeanor becomes a kind of lesson to others. I don't just mean those frost bitten fingers, I mean what you hold to be important might change. I think this is one way explorers pass on what they have found out.

exploration algebra

Those well meaning but deluded folk who believe that exploration should be an enterprise for scientists in expensive 4x4s might consider the following formula:

E=DC²

Where E= Exploration, D=Discovery and C=Challenge

When Challenge is 0, so is the Exploration value. You have Discovery only, the kind of thing that can happen in a laboratory.

One crucial aspect of exploration is challenge. Why? Because if there is no challenge, no frostbite, or thirst or getting lost then the discoveries made weren't earned. Without challenge it's just another video game and there are enough of those already. That's why a new way to get to the north pole counts as exploration- the challenge factor is high even if the discovery factor is low. Exploration is about seeing new things up close. Experiencing them at first hand. Challenge of a physical kind is needed to get you into the places where new things can be seen. It's so important that it's been raised to the power two...

If you doubt that some expedition has 'discovery' value then you are probably self-censoring. In fact there are always new things to discover as the world is always changing.

When you need to show that exploration has a scientific end, retort that it even has a mathematical basis these days!

rock art expedition to the gilf kebir

The explorer school (of which I am a part) is tentatively putting together an expedition for later 2010 or early 2011 in search of Saharan engravings and rock art in the Gilf Kebir area of Egypt. This will be a proper three week expedition totally devoted to exploration though we will visit the Mestakawi-Foggini Cave and Wadi Soura. The idea is to take vehicles to an area never before explored and then walk each day averaging 20-25km of canyon, mountain and cave investigation. We will meet the vehicles again at night but to minimise their destructive impact (tyre tracks last forever) they will stay clear of the exploration area. As on our other expeditions we need fit, enthusiastic people with a flexible approach. If you think you might qualify let us know (email is on theexplorerschool.com site.) There will be room for a maximum of ten people only. It'll be incredible because there is so much still to find out there. Watch theexplorerschool.com site for more info.