For those who wondered what rafting trips are like – they are incredibly exhausting, extremely taxing on both the mind and the body; involves eating, sleeping and peeing in tents, and having the best time of your life! On our trip to Shivpuri, we also got to experience an Uttaranchal Bus Transport Strike and therefore got to travel in a luxurious Volvo vehicle with a blaring T.V set and seats that could lean all the way back and stopped at the U.P –Uttaranchal border at 4 in the morning, in the middle of a reserve forest so that we could switch buses. But nothing beat getting into the water and rafting through the whipping waters of the Ganga. What happens is this: we’re initially given our rafting gear which includes helmets, insanely tight life jackets which make us all feel like proud 36-D’s and bright yellow paddles. We’re instructed to wear shorts – the philosophy behind this wise idea is that shorts dry much faster than pants; hold on to the ends (T-grips) of our paddles and are given lessons on the correct manner of front paddling, back-paddling and moving to the high side of the raft incase of instability, before our rafts are pushed into the water. If you are on a raft with a bunch of over-enthusiastic swimmers, then you are bound to be pushed into the pristinely clear and freezing waters of the river Ganges as soon as the preliminary puny rapids are crossed. But the shock of hitting the cold water and being lugged back into the raft all shivering and cold is totally compensated for when one rafts through rapids which have probably existed for centuries. One doesn’t need to be particularly fond of the water to thoroughly enjoy the experience of riding over a rapid in an inflatable plastic raft. There is something unbeatable and exhilarating and about maneuvering through swirling waters and fighting gushing waves that makes you want to repeat the entire process again and again. We did several grade 3 rapids (there are higher levels of rapids going on to grade 5 and grade 6 for which we scrawny beginners are too inexperienced), some of them with very interesting names like ‘The Golfcourse’ and ‘three blind mice’. Our rafts would dive into the churning waters and we generally came out unscathed though on some occasions we had to fish out lost paddles, grimy crocks of a fellow rafter and on one instance our logic lecturer from the water. No amount of volleyball on the beach or building sandcastles or having peanuts and krackjack biscuits or grumbling about sore arses and aching shoulders prevented us from tackling ‘The Wall’ the next day. ‘The Wall’ was the toughest rapid we encountered through the 40 kilometres of rafting that our trip included.It is famous for the stealthy way in which it comes upon a raft, one cannot really see it as we glide through the waters, but it pounces on you after a quiet corner and the raft suddenly plunges into happily churning waters with a particularly nasty eddy rotating its way underwater.
Rafting straight into this rapid was, by infinite amounts, the best moment of the trip.We watched as a couple of rafts ahead of us flipped through the massive waves, throwing their passengers into the deep blue before we went into the evilly grinding waters ourselves. We nearly flipped, our star rafter was thrown into the water, the paddlers on the right side of the raft were pushed to the left side, a couple of rafters lost their paddles but the puniest people on the raft responded well to the screaming guide’s instructions to back paddle and steered us to safer waters. It was brilliant, unforgettable. The rafting was not the only activity that made this trip so amazing though. We camped on the banks of the Ganga in tents and experienced the intricacies of using sand-pit loos (too long to explain), sleeping in tents under the most comfortable quilts and having amazing food under a star filled sky. Several of us spent long, productive hours after rafting playing poker and resorting to winning on luck and getting beaten by novices who have just learnt to play the game. One raft even sighted a body floating through the waters of the sacred Ganges precariously close to ‘The Wall’. Several of us jumped off a 15 foot high cliff into the river below, some of the girls needed a lot of convincing before they agreed to jump off and did everything the instructors told them not to do (like look down instead of looking straight ahead n screaming with their mouths wide open) but everyone came out of the water looking absolutely thrilled and ready to take the jump again. Between worrying about sore ankles and pimples, we had a dazzling experience. The adventure and the mere thrill of overcoming a rapid was extraordinary. It was good to wake up in the morning and see the blue river flowing peacefully just a few metres away from our tents. It was good to know that even though individually we are scrawny and ridiculously helpless with a paddle, as a team of 7-8 people, we were quite strong. It is good to know that even though we are small, compared to the might of the Ganga and the huge mountains of the Himalayas surrounding us, we could cross the waters and made it to the other side.
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