Luke Partridge: The river of gold

Me and George had made a hasty dash back to Kathmandu from Pokhara on a hellish micro bus ride after our Kali Gandaki and lower Modi Khola trip. After a couple phone calls we arranged to meet the remainder of the team at the bus station in the morning.
We bartered a reasonable price for our taxi from our hotel and arrived with time to spare.

Shortly after our breakfast of cake and bananas, Greg, Bastien, Ciaran and Alex turned up on the back of their pickup truck hired from their accommodation. But Bob was know where to be seen.
"Bob, where are you?"
"I'm at the new bus park. Where are you?"
"At the old bus park where the bus leaves from!"
"... I'll be right there."
It was going to be a fun trip!
We negotiated a surprisingly reasonable price for our kayaks and us to Dolalgat, the put on for the Sun Kosi. On arrival we stocked up on supplies in the small town, our cumulative Nepali language knowledge some how managing to find us everything we required.
A couple weeks before, a team from GRG had made a super fast monsoon run down the river in three days, and our plan was too do a similar thing whilst there was still some reasonable flow in the river.
It was fairly late in the afternoon by the time we managed to put on, and after a couple hours of boogie class 2/3 we found a beautiful campsite just above the first larger rapid, "No Exit".
With Bob managing to source some local moonshine from the tiny village on the hillside, and our dinner cooking on an open fire under views of the milky way, it was already shaping up to be a great time on the river.
Around 2am i awoke to a bright light in my face.
"Hello my English friends!!"
Several locals had ventured to the river to try and catch fish and to come and say hello. Unfortunately, this sentence was all the English they seemed to know, and with our nepali measuring up just as equally, the conversation was limited to say the least.

With nothing else to do in the morning but go kayaking, we were on the water around 7am, the easy rapids of this section washing the sleep from our eyes. The "river of gold" lived up to it's name this morning, the low sun casting a golden glow on the cliffs, the water sparkling and glinting as the waves reflected the morning light.
By mid morning, our stomachs were rumbling and spying a small village on the bank, we pulled in to the eddy to venture in and see if they could provide us with food. After some confusion down to language barriers, we were invited through to the back of one of the buildings for a meal of traditional Nepali dhal Bhat, rice with lentil soup and curry. As we ate more and more of the village came to see these strange white men in their plastic craft and by the time our meal was done we were surrounded by inquisitive faces. Once we had eaten our fill we came to pay, but our money was not welcome, and one of the younger villagers managed to communicate that we were "welcome anytime!".
This is something i've really enjoyed about Nepal so far. Once you are off the beaten tracks, then people are incredibly welcoming and friendly.
The day continued with the majority of the paddling being fat water or easy rapids, with the exception of a couple of bigger drops, and after around 80km of flat water, we were happy to reach our camp at Hakapur, just above the biggest rapid on the river.

Yours truly, photo by Bastien DeMange

Planning the journey on our beach camp, photo by Bastien DeMange

We opted for a far more leisurely start today and to add an extra camp in our journey, so we awoke a little later and headed to the village for a breakfast of Chipati and potato curry.
Fuelled up and fired up, we scouted hakapur, the biggest rapid on the river. This rapid has some pretty grim looking holes, with huge waves, several times over head height. Despite this, the line itself was fairly straight forward, and despite a couple of back loops in the huge waves from a couple team members, everyone who ran it made it to the bottom unscathed.

Me running Hakapur, photo by Bastien DeMange

Bob dropping in

George amongst it!

Bastien's loaded boat getting back looped in one of the huge breaking waves

Next up was the Hakapur 3 rapid. A huge but technically easier rapid which all members opted to run this time.

The remainder of the day was spent on easy, yet huge rapids, many with holes that would hold a swimmer and eat kayaks, big waves and boil eddy lines. There were just enough rapids to keep the boredom of further flat water at bay and we enjoyed stunning scenery as we floated down this mighty river.

Our camp that night was above the infamous "jungle corridor", a section of the river around 10km long of continuous class 3-4, again the huge volume creating over head waves and holes, boil eddy lines snatching at our sterns if we weren't on the ball. rounding the corner from our camp we bumped in to Darren Clarkson-king, who was there with a group on a trip with his company Pure land expeditions.
I had unfortunately become really ill the night before, and felt incredibly sick by the time the evening came around, barely stomaching my Dhal Bhat from the village next to our camp at Tribeni, the confluence of the Tamur. Our original plan had been to paddle the Tamur after the Sun Kosi, again at a higher level than the majority of commercial trips. However, it became apparent from the amount of water flowing into the Sun Kosi that it would have been a fool hardy attempt so that idea was quickly put to bed, as was i.
We had a short paddle in the morning to Chatra, where transport back to Kathmandu would have normally been simple. Unfortunately, the fuel crisis had rendered almost all public transport inoperable, so after some phone calls from our friendly Nepali guest house owner, who Bob knew from previous years, we embarked on a huge 21 hour journey back to the capital, the bus journey proving once again to be the crux of the expedition!