Messing About On The River
Trip Start
Oct 15, 2007
1
57
97
Trip End
Aug 24, 2008
Turangi,
North Island,
New Zealand
Friday, February 15, 2008
After a bit of a wait for everyone to arrive, we were provided with damp fleeces to put on under our damp wetsuits, damp neoprene booties, damp buoyancy aids and silly plastic helmets. The big old bus to the river had plastic sheeting over the seats, and one of the guides, Tim, spent the journey being silly, breaking the ice and the like. He did a considerably better job than his namesake at the Waitomo Caves: this time the silliness felt like light hearted banter, as opposed to a desperate attempt to cover up a catalogue of inadequacies.
"Have any of you ever done this before?"
Many shakes of heads and "No"s from the group.
"Hmmm, so, first time on a bus for everyone then...?"
That sort of thing. He also pointed out a feature that appealed to Kirsty's zoological tendencies: the rare New Zealand Snow Leopard. It looked surprisingly like a sheep. In fact, the fields and fields full of them all looked just like sheep.
We arrived at the river and were divided into three groups. Our group was to be led by a guide called Callum and apart from us consisted of Caroline and Mark, a British couple who now lived in New Zealand, and a pair of Dutch guys called Wantou and Klaus. We were taught the basics of paddling a raft ("Forwards!", "Backwards!", "Forwards on the right, Backwards on the left!", "STOP!" etc) and we were off.
Paddling seemed to be mostly for control, propulsion being largely taken care of by the current. We spent a while paddling, stopping, paddling, dropping down little splashy bits, getting wet, paddling, bouncing off big clusters of rocks (and occasionally getting stuck on them) and dropping down much bigger, more violent splashy bits, before stopping for a bit, by a huge great rocky promontory.
We'd been told we could jump in to the river from here if we liked. Although inroads had been made into it by the bacon butties and coffee, Jacob's hangover was still clinging on, so taking a running jump into a freezing river seemed like a good way to chase it away. Three leaps into the river later, he felt suitably refreshed, and we paddled off, for pretty much a repeat of the last paragraph.
The river ran through a gorge within the grounds of a prison (a long way up steep sided cliffs, behind fences), where the water was calmer and flatter, so we leapt in and swam alongside the raft for a while. At the other end of the trip, the bus was waiting for us. Before leaving, we had to walk through a bucket of disinfectant solution, to help prevent the spread of the dreaded Didymo.
Didymosphenia geminata (known as 'Didymo' or 'Rock Snot'), is one of many freshwater algae. It can spell death for a river, forming into thick brown layers of gunge with long flowing 'rat tails', which completely smother all other life. It can be spread in a single drop of water, and all practitioners of any aquatic activity in New Zealand are urged to completely clean and dry everything before contact with another body of water. There are large posters (and car stickers, and stickers on the back of Tim's helmet) all about the place, saying "Say No To Didymo!"
After sloshing about in the bucket, we returned to the raft centre, where all our kit was sluiced with fresh water, and we were fed. We were shown the photos which had been taken of the day's trip, and we decided not to buy them. A couple of them were pretty good, but not that many, and not worth the asking price. Weeks later, whilst sorting through redundant paperwork which was starting to take over the van, we found our collection of vouchers, torn from a tourist info leaflet, one of which entitled us to free photos from Tongariro River Rafting. Bugger.
That rainy afternoon, not content with the day's activity levels so far, we went to the 'Vertical Assault' climbing wall at the 'Extreme Backpackers' hostel in Turangi. Nicely grandiose. They had to go through the mechanisms of climbing safety gear with us, and had a prepared speech for anyone who, like us, already knew precisely what we were doing.
"Oh no, it's different here, we've got different stuff. Had to import it specially from Europe. Cost thousands of dollars."
Approaching the wall, we saw a collection a Petzl GriGris, a type of belay apparatus which Jacob had used before, used to sell so knew how to explain, and which anyone can pick up the use of in minutes.
"Ah, GriGris, I know these."
"No, these are different! Had to import these ones specially from Europe!"
They weren't different, they were Petzl GriGris, and the way Vertical Assault insisted everybody used them, on pain of being chucked out, was a pain in the arse. A belay device is a brake, quite simply, through which a rope, attached to a climber, is run. When whatever mechanism necessary for your device of choice is operated, the rope cannot move, so the climber, provided their rope runs through some sort of anchor somewhere, does not plummet to his or her doom. The 'second' holds the end of the rope and operates the belay device, which is attached, in most cases, to them. The various different forces at work in this setup mean that Kirsty can hold Jacob's weight, with one hand on the rope, without leaving the deck.
All understood so far?
Good.
The GriGri is a spring loaded, moving-cam contraption which, if you let go of it, locks up, so if you're knocked out by falling rocks or somesuch and let go, the rope is then locked off and your climbing partner doesn't plummet. These guys insisted on you only using one hand to pull the slack rope through as the climber climbed (if they couldn't see your hand behind your back, you were in trouble). You couldn't guide the rope through from the other side - or touch the device in any way - in the normal, proper, make-life-easier fashion. Only upon lowering the climber were you allowed to bring the other hand into play.
Worse than all that though was it being tethered to the floor, so when you then tethered yourself to it, you couldn't move. This does mean that very small people can belay very big people without fear of being yanked off the floor in the event of a fall, but then so does the optional, non-compulsory use of the floor anchors, as is the case at other climbing walls. The anchors were placed in the optimum recommended position to stand in when belaying, but there are other things to consider too which make being rooted to the spot very silly. It means that when you lower somebody off, they land on your face, for example. If the ropes start to rub or twist together, you can't move out of the way.
Basically, there are ways to use a 'floor anchor' type setup if it is necessary, but if it's not necessary, it makes life awkward - and possibly dangerous - for all concerned. There was an insistence on the use of lowest-common-denominator techniques by everybody, regardless of skill level or experience, in order that the one member of staff on duty could sit behind the reception desk eating a pie without having to actually bother supervising the safety of the fee-paying clientele. The 'sign here to say you know what you're doing and then if you die from anything other than failure of our equipment it's your fault and we've got your signature to prove it' system would make life a lot easier. It would also teach people to use kit properly, which in the long run, is a lot safer.
For all that, the climbing was pretty good. Knackered and covered in chalk, we left to find the makings of a chilli, and, finding the supermarket to only be selling big punnets of mince, we went to look for a butcher's shop. Turangi is probably depressing and concrete-blocky when it's not hammering it down, but when it is hammering it down, it's just nasty. The butcher's was closed until May.
Supermarket, a lot of mince, back in the van...for another thrilling round of 'What the bloody hell do you mean?', courtesy of the lovely DOC campsite listings. We eventually found the Kamanawa Road campsite, having coined a whole new lexicon of inventive profanities in the process.
Setting up camp, we got talking to an English couple, Guy and...Guy's girlfriend, whose name we never found out. Nice enough folks, who had a camp fire going, so he and Jacob spent a while grunting and poking said fire, regressing a few hundred thousand years, as is the wont of blokes with fires.
We set up our awning and sat on our chairs, eating our chilli and drinking our beer. A couple of hands of cards later, we crawled into bed. One of the many advantages of living in a van is that your dining room is about two feet from your bed, which, after a day of rafting and climbing, is about as far as we were prepared to move.
