Follow Meeeee!!!

Bom?!? Crazy language

The abundance of warm weather meant that water in Telemark was fast disappearing, time for us to leave. Next stop Buskerud. We headed north in search of greener pastures and stumbled across a stretch of river nicked named ‘the Zambezi section”. Zambezi aye… that’s that big volume one in Africa isn’t it… the one with lots of water in it, and huge waves, and massive holes that could eat a bus or three?!? Sounds good… where’s the put-in?

Pump those weights!

Well as we drove across the bridge our cocky banter was abruptly ended. The river looked a little on the high side with what Eden and I guessed was 500-600 cumecs (while Rolf tried to workout what the hell a ‘cumec’ was, he’s American you see). Yep that should form one or two big holes we thought to ourselves as we headed up the road for a little closer. Ahh there’s a big hole… and there goes another one. There’s one over there too… there bloody everywhere!

The run is about 10 km long so before diving into reading and running a ‘Zambezi’ style river we though that we would do a little more investigation. The guys at the local rafting place told us the river was ‘high’ and the Zambezi section was pretty full on (but doable). The gauge under the bridge, which was under water, confirmed that it was indeed high. Well it was to late in the day for another run so let’s re-look at it in the morning, time to sleep.

Grass on the roof... more grazing for the sheep I guess

Morning time! Let’s go paddling… or not. Rolf had the crazy idea that with everything being high maybe there could be some good boating in one of the tributaries. As Eden and I didn’t like what we had seen on the Zambezi section we were happy to go for a walk and so we set off. Rolf and Eden headed one direction and I the other. We both had nice walks but didn’t find anything to inspire us enough to hike with heavy boats (it was either too easy or too full on). Funny coincidence too, after walking for over three hours in different directions we arrived back at the car within five seconds of each other (crazy aye). Anyway looks there’s nothing for it… we will have to paddle the Zambezi section.

The next day we meet up with some crazy German boaters who had paddled the run a few days earlier and more importantly knew the lines!! Sweet as then we’ll just follow you guys. And that is exactly what we did. Probably the best way to describe the run was like putting Nevis Bluff and Citron back to back for 10 km (with some ‘flattish’ bits thrown in to calm the nerves). The holes in there were huge that’s the only word for it but our crazy German guides saw us right. My favourite quote on the river was “you can stop and look at this one if you like because it is pretty big but there’s no point because you can’t see anything from the bank anyway”. Ok so we’ll just keep following you then…

If you have managed to read this far then good one ya and you have probably noticed that the photos have nothing to do with the text… basically we didn’t get any photos because we were too scared (and playing follow the crazy German).

Rolf 'the bear' Kelly

Have a good one