We spent Valentine’s Day on an all-day raft trip down the Zambezi river. There were two rafts from Zambia and one from Zimbabwe on the trip. We chose to be in the ‘Active’ raft. This consisted of our guide, Boid, flipping our raft through three of the rapids and having us hang on the outside of the raft and float through another set of class 4 rapids outside of the boat. If that wasn’t active enough, he pushed us over a few times just to make sure we were completely exhausted. Ah, that boundless energy from doing this as a living and kayaking the other four days of the week for fun. Boid shook his head at us as we beached ourselves back up over the sides of the raft while he catapulted from the water with a maniacal gleam to his eye.
The width of the gorge was not as wide as I would have imagined, but they said at some sections the depth was 96 meters. Now that is a deep whirlpool. The Zambezi is considered one of the safest rafting rivers in the world due to the depth. So, you can get good Class 4 and 5 rapids without worry of landing or even seeing a rock… which allows you to be out of the raft and freeride through the rapids. The floating and swirling, and of course, the coughing and getting water up your nose, throughout the rapids is great fun. We ran rapids 11 through 23. The top rapids are only open in the fall when the water is low, and low-water is supposed to make the high-water Class 5 rapids look tame. Guess they need a 5+, 5++, 5+++ grading system?
The gorge was stunning. The black basalt blocks were mind boggling. The blue sky up above the jungle vegetation was amazing.
The only downside of the entire day is the hellacious climb/scramble back up out of the canyon at the end of the day. This ends up being a 40 minute climb on wooden pegged latters that gets your heart racing to maximum stairmaster levels. If you stop to catch your breath, a set of hornets start biting you and huge man-eating flies start to hone in on you. We thought we might die before we reached the top. It took us three days for our legs to stop wobbling when we went up or down stairs after that climb. Ouch. Some of the guys/kids hauling the raft equipment back up the hill were in perfect shape. They would make a number of body builders swoon with jealousy. The upside of that job is that you become a physical chick magnet if you stick with the career, the downside is that it only pays $10 USD/month.
Our truck heading us back to the rafting headquarters headed through some villages. We were back to mud huts, but most were square, not round. Even in basic housing like this you see the special touches from folks with a penchant for flower gardens and art. One of the small mud buildings was turned into a beauty parlor and braiding was underway. At one point we stopped to wait for one of the porters. The young kids from the area started to surround the truck and call for ‘Icees’ which caused a few of the guides to start tossing handfuls of the block ice from the cooler over to them. This became ‘toy extradonaire’. It could be melted on you, in your mouth, on a tree, on your brother or sister, and rolled in the dirt. The little kids seemed quite pleased that things were running a bit slow today.
