Adventures with Rajan: Rafting the Trishuli

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In the past few weeks, Heather and I have discovered the joy of making friends with travel agents. We found Rajan in our intial inquiries about trekking possibilities, and sometime in the last two weeks he's become not just our travel agent but our friend and general social organizer. The next few blogs are mostly photos from the various adventures we've had with Rajan, starting with our rafting trip down the Trishuli River.

Rafting the Trishuli

Although the river was primarily flat, we had our share of exciting moments on the Trishuli. The first big rapid we hit threatened to swallow or flip our entire raft, as we got stuck in a huge hole and managed to suck water and waves for at least a full two minutes. Somehow we miraculously escaped, but not before Rajan was chucked from the raft and sent down river with a paddle and three of our flip flops.

The scenery was the most spectacular I have ever encountered while rafting. We had the great fortune of clear skies after twenty four hours of rain, and the hillsides were as brilliant green as the sky was blue. Terraces stretched up the mountain sides and hand-pulled bridges travelled from one side of the river to the other. At times we would round a bend and spot a herd of goats scavenging on a beach or an old fisherman casting his handmade nets in the middle of the river. Unfortunately most of the scenery is not photo-documented, as taking a camera down the Trishuli river in monsoon season would classify as something near idiocy.

We were intially promised an evening spent camping on the banks of the Trishuli with a campfire, but after a few hours of rafting we found ourselves deposited in the slightly less glamorous gravel parking lot of a local restaurant. Rajan, who hadn't been rafting in a few years, had forgotten and neglected to tell us that tent camping is impossible in monsoon season. Heather and I spotted a beach across the river from our parking lot campground and begged to sleep there but were thankfully rejected. The next morning (after an entire night of rain that seeped through our tents) our beach was under at least five feet of water and the river was swollen and rushing fast.

The bus ride home to Kathmandu was, like most bus rides, a memorable one. The heavy rains from the night before had caused a landslide up the road, so the only buses that were coming through were already crammed with people trying to make it back to the Kathmandu valley. Eventually we flagged down a bus that looked like it had space, only to discover that it had been converted to a goods transport. The bus seats were stacked with boxes of pomegranates from the terai, and only two rows of seats remained. Heather was small enough to clamber up to the top of a stack of pomegranate boxes and perch up there for the rest of the ride, while I managed to find my way from a crammed bus row to the floor of the bus (surrounded on three sides by precariously swaying stacks of fruit boxes). Rajan climbed into the cab of the bus with the driver.

Some photos.

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