Rafting the Mighty Zambezi

He could have been a Zambian Chris Rock, but Boyd was actually our river guide down the Zambezi.    With a heavy Jamaican lilt to his voice he commanded us to dig deeper into the waters, lean forward and pull back on those oars.   Before each “countable” rapid (we paddled through 25 on our day long trip) Boyd would map out his plan of attack.   “this next rapid is a class 5 in the middle, class 4 on the left side and class 3 on the right side.   I don’t want to take you down the middle because we could get caught in the ‘washing machine’ – a forever churning whirlpool of water ready to chew up a raft and keep it in perpetual motion.”   “When I tell you to dig in and paddle right, you guys in the front (not us or our Canadian friends, but two young men in their twenties) dig in and keep going til I tell you to ‘Hold on (to the shit line) and Ghet down!’ or “Have a nice swim and I’ll see you at the end of the rapid.”  When we were successful Boyd gleefully demanded that we “do high five!…do high five!” with our raised oars meeting high overhead in the middle of the boat.

Well, it was probably inevitable… the walls of rushing water would eventually claim one of us; each of us desperate, though, to not be the one. During our journey through “Gulliver’s Travels”…. a particularly treacherous stretch of the river,….Vince failed to get down fast enough.  We’ll never really know what distracted him….maybe the jagged rocks on the banks, maybe it was simply the wall of raging water, maybe he was anticipating the egg salad lunch….and it’s probably immaterial. Within seconds he was sucked out of the boat but clung doggedly to the line.  Boyd abandoned his steering post and reeled Vince back in by lifting the shoulders of his lifejacket up and over the side of the boat.  After he regained his composure, Vince described the experience as incredible – his total disorientation, the submersion of his body save his hands clinging to the “oh shit” line encircling the boat.   Of course Vince’s dramatic rescue put the rest of us in dire danger since Boyd couldn’t help us through the rapid as planned.  But it clearly served as a reminder….nothing short of complete and utter focus on the task at hand was required for survival.

At lunch time when the half day rafters left us to climb out of the gorge, we thanked our lucky stars that we didn’t have to make that steep vertical climb.  We were told that the trip took the younger, fitter folks 30 to 40 minutes, but the Greek middle aged woman clad in gold slippers took an astonishing two hours to make it to the top.   I still think Vince could have out whined even her!  After lunch we had 15 more rapids remaining.  During the last of a string of them called “the Three Ugly Sisters,” Boyd kept yelling at us to paddle hard to the right and dig in deeper….an unusually complex series of maneuvers.  We obeyed….assuming, as we did for most of the day, that our lives depended upon total and complete obedience.   Little did we know he had played the ultimate trick on us! When we finished the rapid and noticed that it was unusually quiet, we looked back and discovered that he wasn’t even in the boat!  He was waving to us from a rock up stream – a kind of stone throne.  We were dumbfounded and delighted.

Sounds are amplified by the canon walls.  When we hauled our exhausted bodies out of the canyon, at day’s end, the echo was unmistakable:  “we rafting….we rafting….we rafting down the mighty Zambeeeezi……..we rafting, we rafting, we rafting down the Mighty Zambeeeezi!!!”