The Mighty Zambezi

Rafting the Zambezi - it sounds so wild, so exotic and adventurous.

Just below Victoria falls, all that water, now flowing at maybe 6 million litres per second across the 1.7km width of the falls, is charging down a deep and narrow gorge. This was big water. We rode waves over two metres high in the rapids -capsized and took a roller-coaster of a chilly swim, survived moments when I was sure we were going over, when we disappeared completely into waves, tilted, but somehow popped out upright, and all in all had a damn good time. We jumped in to swim a grade 2 rapid, finding ourselves swirling in whirlpools, ducked by the waves, and feeling the power of the huge currents.

It wasn't as extreme as I'd expected though, maybe because it was more about big waves and churning water than rocks and drops.

The walk to the put-in was long and steep down the side of the gorge, so it's not only the shoulders that are aching today. On the way up, after a short climb, we clambered into what was essentially a glorified shopping trolley to be pulled up by a single cable along tram-tracks. The gradient was dizzying, specially taken in conjunction with the "as shown on Blue Peter" construction of the whole apparatus. The back-up brake was a pile of rocks at the bottom of the slope. I imagine we were meant to be reassured by the words "Totally Zambian" emblazoned on the side of the contraption. I wasn't sure whether the beers at the top were to celebrate surviving the rafting or the "train", so I thought it advisable to down one for each.