Down The Mighty Zambesi

The morning paper reports that President Chiluba has lifted Zambia’s twenty-seven-year State of Emergency. The police have been ordered to remove all road-blocks (still common in countries like Sudan, Ethiopia and Kenya) and various powers of search and detention have been curtailed.

For myself and the crew another day of new experiences. If it’s Saturday it must be white-water rafting, and we assemble by the swimming-pool to sign in, absolve the company taking us of any culpability and generally try to look cheerful. Basil is very silent. He has persuaded himself that the photo-opportunities outweigh the fact that he can’t swim. But only just. Fraser has spent hours devising a waterproof method of recording my shouts, screams and cries. His solution is to encase tape-recorder, battery, microphone and all the wiring in a selection of condoms. ‘I’ve never used so many in one day in my life,’ he claims.

Nigel has a tiny waterproof camera on a huge harness, which sits on his shoulder like a parrot. Patti must be one of the very few who have been white-water rafting in the same week as having malaria.

The organizer of the expedition is a short, lean, bearded American called Conrad with an intense, some might say manic, look in his eyes, softened by a ready smile. We are issued with life-jackets and then briefed by Heidi, another American who manages to put over dreadful information with a disarming, gung-ho jollity. Most of what she tells us has to do with what happens when, rather than if, we are flung off the boats and into the water.

‘Just let yourself go. Don’t try to swim . . . When you come up to the surface be sure to take a deep breath before you go under again.’

My legs are like jelly at the end of this and Basil is white. We select our life-jackets and head for the river.

What neither Conrad nor Heidi has prepared us for is the descent into the gorge, which involves a rough 30-minute scramble, in considerable heat, over smooth and slippery boulders. Bad enough at the best of times, but with camera gear as well it delivers us to the rafts in a state of terminal exhaustion.

We climb into the reassuringly solid, heavy-duty rubber rafts, made by Avon in England. Eight to a raft, with a driver mounted on a central cross-board. We pull out into the stream, dwarfed by sheer rock walls and pinnacles of basalt. The Zambesi, as it winds through the gorge, falls over a series of twenty-odd rapids, of which we shall be tackling the first ten.

My companions are local people, some of whom, thankfully, know what to do. Our driver, Alex, a rangy black Zambian, rehearses us in the technique known as high-siding, which seems to mean flinging ones body as far forward in the raft as possible to keep the nose down and stop us being turned over by the force of the water. Once rehearsed, we move across the deceptively tranquil, unruffled pool between falls and rapid number one and wait for the camera crew’s raft to go over first.

Heidi steadies them into position. Basil is tucked down at the back, almost on the floor of his raft, hanging on to everything it is possible to hang on to. Heidi guides them slowly to the lip of the rapid. Much depends on how she lines the raft up. Satisfied she’s hit the right spot, she allows the raft to glide forward and into the rapid. For a split second it accelerates like a rocket, twists, turns, carves into a reverse wave and momentarily disappears in a spectacular eruption of spray before bobbing away into safe water.

Seeing it happen to someone else merely increases the thud-rate of an already overworked heart, and only when we ourselves fly down the rapid, fling ourselves forwards on Alex’s command ‘Go!’ and experience the exhilaration of total immersion do I begin to relax and even to suspect that I might enjoy myself.

Rapid five is the most spectacular, with a steep drop of more than twenty-five feet. Exhilaration and excitement make up for fatigue as we progress into some longer but less steep runs. I suppose the maximum time we spend on a rapid is no more than forty-five seconds, but into that time is packed an enormous amount of action, and the outpouring of nervous energy can only be released by bawling one’s lungs out.

The sheer relief at reaching the tenth and last rapid, with the day’s filming done and soft evening light catching the walls of the canyon, leads me to do a Very Silly Thing.

The crew of my raft manage to persuade me that there is an even more wonderful experience than white-water rafting and that is to swim, or rather let your body be carried, down a rapid. I ask about the crocodiles we’d seen further up the gorge. No problem, they avoid moving water. I ask about the rocks. No problem, way below the surface. Such is their enthusiasm and my joy at having survived this far that I surrender to a dangerous streak of natural impulsiveness, and jump, with them, off the raft and into the waters of rapid number ten.

As soon as I leave the boat I know I should have stayed in it. The current is fast and there is no way of controlling my progress. Within half a minute I’m swept and spun along before being tugged helplessly beneath the water by a reverse wave. I strike what is incontrovertibly a rock, and what’s more a particularly sharp and unyielding rock.

The full force of the impact is taken on my lower back, protected, thank God, by my life-jacket, and probably by Fraser’s tape-recorder. My calf meanwhile cracks against another rock that wasn’t supposed to be there either. Winded by the blow, I struggle up to the surface driven by a potent and uncontainable sense of indignation. This enables me to roar, ‘You bastards!’ and take in a mouthful of Zambesi before disappearing again.

My companions are already ashore and gazing around with expressions of beatific happiness when at last I fight my way clear of the current and clamber up the rocky bank. I don’t want to spoil the party so I keep smiling and begin the slow ascent of the gorge, content in the knowledge that, whatever I might have done to myself, Fraser’s condoms are still intact.

At the hotel another bruise to add to the two already growing – one of my missing bags has arrived, the other has been lost by Zambian Airways and no one seems to hold out any hope of finding it.

Whatever baleful influence has been at work in Zambia, it has persisted to the end.