'When saving someone from the water, make sure you save the paddle first. It’s worth $40.’
We all laughed at the instructor’s priorities during his safety presentation but he was actually serious. To effectively pull someone out of the river and into the raft, the paddle needed to be out of the way first.
The location was the bank of the Rio Pastaza, a 45 minute drive south of Baños, Ecuador. Baños de Agua Santa, as it’s officially known (Baths of Holy Water), is a small town in the Tungurahua Province, 176km south of Quito. Situated in the Andes Mountains at an altitude of 1800m.a.s.l, this town of 20,000 inhabitants is a popular spot for both backpackers and Ecuadorians for its natural beauty, thermal baths – heated by the nearby Tungurahua Volcano – and the numerous adventure sports on offer.
I had signed up for a half-day river rafting tour through the Wonderful Ecuador Travel Agency, one of many agencies scattered around town. After a restless night sleep due to nervous excitement, I met with my fellow adventurers for the day, outside the agency on the corner of Maldonado and Oriente Street. The 14 of us – from Europe, the States, Australia and India – hopped in to the Mercedes Sprinter van for a tight comfy fit and we were away.
Once at the river, we were kitted up with all the necessary equipment. Trying to look fashionable was abandoned as we put on tight fitting wetsuits and old tennis shoes. ‘You’ve all been given a life jacket, helmet and paddle,’ explained the instructor. ‘The most important of these … is the life jacket, helmet and paddle.’
Our instructor Dario, a young local lad from Baños, ran us through the safety procedures and paddling techniques we needed to know, and use, when out on the water. The importance of the safety didn’t have to be pointed out to me. When I arrived in Baños a few days earlier, I read in Mi Cuidad, the local newspaper, a man died whilst rafting only a few weeks earlier. Some of the rapids we were told would be Class IV (long, difficult rapids with constricted passages that often require complex maneuvering in turbulent water). I felt anxious but was keen to get into it. We broke in to two groups of seven, each group accompanied by a guide. As well as the two rafts, three other guides would accompany us in kayaks to pick up anyone that might fall in to the river.
As well as the expected paddling instructions of ‘forward’, ‘back’ and ‘stop’ there was ’high five’ where we all raised our paddles pointing to the sky and shouting our group name.
‘OK. Our group needs a nickname,’ Dario told us. Just then a butterfly fluttered past and a Frenchman in our group suggested ‘mariposa’, the Spanish word for butterfly. But Dario had misheard it.
‘HARRY POTTER!’ shouted Dario, as we raised our paddles in the air.
On further thought, Dario shook his head as if to say Harry Potter was not manly enough to affirm us.
He shouted again, ‘BOB MARLEY!’ This time naming the group himself.
With that sorted we set off from the bank and started our journey down the river. We cheered as we finally got underway, only to stop fifty metres later to run through the safety drills again in shallow water.
This time we were off for real as Dario shouted orders from the back of the raft and we did our best to work in unison. We were four people either side and the front two controlled the pace, counting ‘one, two’ out loud as the rest of us followed their rhythm. It was quite funny if we had to paddle for 15 seconds or longer without a break as their voices became noticeably weaker, expressing the exhaustion the rest of us felt. One of them, an English surfer dude from Cornwall, was keen to flip the raft just for a laugh. I was keen for it to happen too. I wanted to put all that training of saving the $40 paddles into practise.
The river wasn’t too rough at this stage as we got into the swing of things. The splash of the cold water from the waves was very welcome as the heat of the sun was intense.
We came to the first set of serious rapids and did our best to keep paddling as we bobbed up and down over the waves until we made it through to the other side upright and with everyone on board. With the adrenaline flowing, we celebrated our success with our paddles in the air.
‘BOB MARLEY!’
It was then that we turned around and noticed the raft of the other group was upside down and bodies and paddles were floating in the water, scattered all over the 30 metre wide river. We stopped to help pick-up any people or paddles that came our way until everyone had regrouped again and was back in the raft. With everyone uninjured and accounted for, we set off again.
It wasn’t long before we were approaching a set of severe rapids – Class IV. This was the moment I’d been waiting for, the adventure I’d signed up for. It would be a true test of our skill and team work.
‘OK guys,’ Dario broke my introspection. ‘This next bit is too dangerous. We’re going to get out and walk.’ Oh, how deflating. It wasn’t so much that the rapids were big, because we navigated rapids just as big later on, but that there were a lot of rocks that could have caused injury were someone to have fallen out. 100 metres down the river and back in to our yellow boat and we were paddling again. ‘One, two. One, two.’
All was going well until at one point we were heading sideways and slightly backwards. The river dropped about half a metre, tipping the raft 45 degrees. The people seated on the side of the raft sticking up were flipped out and they took a few of those sitting on the lower side out with them. I somehow managed to stay in due to my foot being wedged in the raft. Thankfully the raft didn’t capsize as I may have been trapped underneath it. The training kicked in and it was action all stations. The few that were still in the boat set about pulling the others back in. I got to fulfill my wish of saving a $40 paddle. Dario was well pleased with how efficiently we mobilized and regrouped again.
At the half way mark, we stopped at a small tributary for a break. We cooled off by resting in the calm water, whilst some of us took it in turns to jump off a wall in to the deep water two metres below.
Things weren’t so calm when we were back in the boat, however. We came across an area of the river where the current was fast and the water was very choppy and violent. We had a few attempts at ‘surfing’ on a reversal – where the current swings upward and revolves back on itself – in this instance, due to a large rock obstructing the current. We made a contingency plan before hand to swim for shore if the boat flipped but we managed to hold it together whilst spinning in the whirlpool-esque backflow before being spat out downstream again.
Before we knew it, we had reached our destination. The hour and a half had flown by. Everyone wished we could have kept going but Dario explained the river ahead was too dangerous. We got changed, packed up the equipment and piled back in to the van where we were driven to the nearby town of Rio Negro for our included lunch. Everyone was still on a high as we sat down and recounted our experiences on the water. Everyone was in agreement that it had been an exhilarating adventure. The only question that remained was what adventure would we do the next day.
