Raving Rafters - Part I

The following blog is an excerpt from a book titled “Discovery India ’07 ” authored by me. (The book hasn’t been written yet though :D).


I choked and vomited all the stuff right after the last drops of tea went inside my tummy. Blame it on all those rotis, dum aloos, panner butter masalas etc. etc… which I had the previous day and the chai which I had just now acted like a catalyst in bringing the stuff inside my stomach out :-( … Looks like my stomach went on strike for some reason. It simply hadn’t secreted any digestive juices. (How mean?????)

Well the positive side of my vomiting is that all my room mates woke up from their deep slumber. They were still sleeping even after repeated snoozes from their mobiles. There were 5 of us (sara, jesse, arun, dhanss n me) and we were staying @ a hotel in Haridwar (or Hardwar that’s how the people of haridwar choose to spell their town’s name …..hmmm how strange Hard War). It was only 4:30 AM but we had planned to be up by four o clock itself. We had decided to do some rafting in the Ganges that day and that rafting wala had asked us to report @ his office in Rishikesh by 7 AM.

So we got ready and finally reached Rishikesh @ around 7:15 after traveling for about 1 hour in a rickety Uttaranchal govt. bus. We met our rafting wala and he said that a jeep will be coming to pick us up and in the meantime he asked us to have breakfast. (well I decided to give in to my little tummy's demands and didn’t take any food…. jus a glass of milk bus!).

The jeep, which he mentioned, was waiting for us, outside the restaurant to take us to a place called Shivpuri further up the mountain along the Ganges. We had planned to raft from Shivpuri to Rishikesh covering some 17 kilometers in the river. I was absolutely thrilled about this, but it lasted only for a moment. When I opened the jeep door I saw the life jackets, helmets paddles etc. etc… The raft in which we were about to travel was deflated and tied over the jeep. dunno y but the thought that I was going to cover 17 kms in the Ganges with the help of these accessories sent shivers down my spine.

As the jeep moved up the hill my fears only worsened. We were moving along the Ganges and we could see the river raging down the mountains with tremendous speed. I looked @ sara.. "man how r we going to raft in that… It looks very very fearsome and dangerous???? " i didn’t get any reply from him. Ever since we started talking about rafting, he has been saying this "enaku thannilla kandam" (he had somehow convinced himself that venturing out in the water isn’t very safe for him). Looks like my question had only increased his fears and I could clearly see that in his face. I said, “Well don’t worry man. Even if you die today the Ganges will take u to heaven straight.” He jus glared at me. (Damn y dont i hold my tongue).

We finally reached our destination Shivpuri. As we were getting down the jeep, Jesse asked, "dude u remember the movie final destination?” “yup why are u asking??” I asked. “i m afraid that some freak accident similar to the 1 in that movie can happen to us”. I said not to worry about it because there weren’t any rafting related accidents in that movie trilogy so far. I just asked him to relax. Then suddenly arun quipped “maybe they ll put our accident in final destination IV”.

I was trying my best not to show my fears off to them. However, it was getting increasingly difficult for me to control my fears especially with so much pessimism around. So I decided to walk away from that conversation and moved towards to the bank of the river. Dhanss also joined me. We stood there took a deep breath. "My god the view is sooo beautiful feels like heaven da” I said. The ever philosophical Dhanss decided to put one of his philosophies on to me "machan azaghu eppovumay aabhathu" (means all tht s beautiful is dangerous) unfortunately @ the wrong time for me.

So on the whole, no one was very comfortable with the idea of rafting at least for the time being. Suddenly we were a group of extremely pessimistic thinkers. We could see our raft was being inflated and we were asked to put on the life jackets and helmets. A man named Deepak came over to us and introduced himself as the captain of the raft. (hmmm i thought only ships had captains)

Another problem with our group was, except Jesse no one knew hindi and unfortunately for us our captain didn’t know english. So we had to depend entirely on Jesse for the translations. The captain said that he was going to give us some vital instructions and asked us to listen carefully. Well Jesse had a habit of skipping some points while translating so we were not at all comfortable with the idea of him translating to us. But we had no other choice. :-( .We had to depend on him.

(The blanks in this paragraph are all hindi sentences and since I do not know hindi I couldn’t type it out lol)

So our captain began "yeh life jacket 150 kilos weight .......................”. The fact that most of the northies mix a lotta english words in their hindi certainly helped me. I decided to guess the translations myself with my “thoda thoda hindi” knowledge. Jesse translated it for us "He was saying that this life jacket could bear upto 150 Kg of weight. (Hurray! I had guessed that correctly. I quietly congratulated myself). I was listening to him with all my attention, catching every word from his mouth. (hmmm if only i had given this much attention to my collg lectures atleast my GPA wud have been higher .hmmmm anyway no use thinkin of it now). He was continuing "....rapids hai..... raft capsize b ho gaya......."Wait wait did he jus say "Capsize"???? Oh my goodness"

“There are chances that the raft can get capsized while wading through a rapid. But there is nothing to worry” Jesse translated it for us. Deepak continued “Life jacket hai naa ?? No problem. Important thing is enjoyment. So no worries guys!!”

Then he continued teaching us some basic commands, which he would be giving to us while we paddle.(Looks like the captain of a raft is no different from a captain of the ship). “Paddle Forward” meant that we had to move the paddle from front to back in the water to move forward. “Paddle Backward” meant the vice-versa. In addition to this there was one more command “Fast Forward” meaning that we had to paddle forward rapidly. So with these basic lessons we finally climbed on the raft and took our positions. By this time the fear component in us was slowly evaporating and was being replaced by the thrill component

The captain gave out his first command “Paddle forward”


To be continued…