SWIMMING - ONLY JUST -WITH THE CROCODILES

Batoka Gorge, Victoria Falls: 18 December 2001

The hardest part about white water rafting is walking out of the awesome Batoka Gorge at the end of the day. When you're told in the morning that the climb is 250 vertical metres and there are rough wooden ladders for much of the way, it doesn't sound too difficult - but after a day of rafting and swimming it is an exhausting ordeal.
The climb seems to go on forever and you find yourself stopping more and more often to "admire the view" and then struggling to get your feet moving again to take another couple of steps.
The rafting itself is seriously good fun and worth every cent (US, that is!): $85. The day started, nervously, with collection from the Jollyboys Backpackers at about 8 am and ended with us crawling out of the truck at about 7 pm, then sitting around like braindead zombies clutching beers for another hour before collapsing into bed. It felt like we'd been awake for a lot longer than we had.
After the briefing and a small breakfast - it comes back for seconds, thirds and fourths during the morning, we signed away our lives and headed for the start, which involved finding a helmet that wasn't too uncomfortable, a life vest that was, and a paddle. If you're dumb, like I was, you also collect a boogie board. Then it's a half kilometer walk down into the gorge.
We stumble down the gorge to the river, carrying all this gear and trying to stop our legs shaking enough so that we could take the next step without falling over. At the bottom we reached the "Boiling Pot", where the river is quite wide and the current flows, strongly, straight through the middle of it.
If you look to the right, you can see part of the Victoria Falls cascading over the lip while to the left is the bridge high above and the first section of river we were going to raft.
Clambering into the raft, the guide directed us to a section of the pontoon she wanted each of us to fall off from and then pushed off into the river, staying in the calmer sections until we'd learned the basics of river survival - how to paddle, how to make the raft turn and what to do when we fell out - rather than "if" we fell out.
The first big job was crossing the Boiling Pot and it's usually where the first fall-outs happen. Not wishing to disappoint, I fell out here - but I did manage to hang on to the raft and help stop it capsizing when it was pushed against the rocks where the current hits the bank.
Once across, Andy (a fellow traveller who was also dumb enough) and myself were shown the rudiments of river boarding, handed our boogie boards and tossed over the side of the raft to brave the rapids. Hoo Boy, had we misjudged things! It was great fun but supremely exhausting - the guide showed us where to go but our legs refused to send us there fast enough to avoid getting swept into the more turbulent water and the SpeedQueen heavy duty cycle every time we reached a rapid.
On the second or third rapid, I missed the line by about 3 feet and "enjoyed" an extra-heavy duty wash cycle as the river took me. The first second under water was scary as panic autoloaded, but once I controlled that and relaxed, the enjoyment came back and I popped to the surface in another 2 or 3 seconds.
We boarded for a third of the morning, Andy taking several detours as the river carried him to out of the way sections and he flip-flipped like mad (to no avail), trying to get back into the current, and then climbed - thankfully - back aboard the raft until lunch. Some of the rapids were considered too severe for us to do on the boogie boards and we were summoned back to the raft anyway, saving us the indignity of having to admit defeat or cowardice.
Early on, we managed to spoil what would have been a perfect (I thought!) rapid run by hitting the rocks at the edge and putting a hole in the raft, having to split up the team and spread out among the other rafts.
It is difficult to recall exactly how all the rapids progressed, things "flowing" into each other rather fast. Once we'd calmed down - Lisa never quite did - and realised that falling out wasn't the worst thing in the world (scraping the skin off your toes as you scrabbled for purchase in the raft felt a lot worse!), it became even more fun and I found the rapids were too short - over before I really realised they had begun.
Commercial rafting companies are not allowed to take customers through Grade 6 rapids (we only did Grades 1 to 5) and so we all had to portage around No 9 - which looks truly incredible and watching the safety kayakers, who accompanied the whole trip, go down makes me want to go away, learn to white water kayak properly and then come back and do it properly!
We made it through the most difficult of the rapids, No 7, like real rafters, with only of the people on board electing to fall out and get swept down to where a safety kayakers collected her and brought her back at the end of it all.
After lunch, the rapids either became easier or we had settled into some form of a team and were beginning to work together to get the raft into the right place. I suspect it was the former.
At rapid No 13 - named The Mother - we managed to upend the raft and all go for a swim but surprisingly we all managed to hang on and clamber back aboard after Petros, our dreadlocked guide, had righted the raft.
I did some more river boarding, enjoying it much more in the afternoon as I had more control and a little feel for what I should be doing by that time. We also saw some crocs sunning themselves on the banks (small ones, the big ones apparently not surviving the drop over the falls and the small ones getting washed further downstream as the river rises each rainy season) and watched a cormorant diving for dinner before the current carried us all too quickly to our exit point.
From there it was a long slow slog out of the gorge to the cold beers at the top, a very bumpy ride back to the base and dinner while the video of the day was prepared. Being able to watch what we'd been through and what we'd done - cockups included - was really fun, especially pointing out each other's petrified expressions as something happened.
Then home to bed and the aches and pains of tired muscles the next morning.