River of Gold

The Team (left to right)- Dory Sifford, Geraint Anderson, Josephine Meares, Rhodri Anderson, Mandy Chan, Daniel Crowley.  Photo courtesy of Dan Crowley.

We drove back to the house in Antananarivo to meet Dory, the last member of our team, who had flown out later than everyone else.  I also had to swap my kayak for one that still floats.  We were told that there was another 2 Dagger Nomads with no holes or welds in but they were located in Ranomafana.  Our next river was a little further on from there so leaving Jo, our first guide, we set off on our nine and a half hour drive south.

Lemur spotting on the way to the Faravory

Being a passenger in Madagascar is a scary experience.  The horn is an essential, otherwise how else would you let anyone know you’re coming when you are overtaking on a blind corner high on a mountain road.  We passed lots of impressively damaged vehicles like a lorry in a ditch with the entire rear axle another fifty meters up the road.  All the cars and busses had cracked windscreens.  Our bus had completely bald tires resembling formula 1 slicks more than something you would use to combat a muddy dirt track road.

Palm leaves drying in the sun for thatch

We arrived at night and parked on the busy main street where our driver spent a long time on the phone before walking off and leaving us for an even longer time.  Eventually a man turned up peering in through the bus windows and walking around the vehicle a few times.  After unsuccessfully pretending we hadn’t seen him Dan eventually slid the window open slightly.  I’m not sure who this man was but he knew our next guide and set off to find our driver.  He then showed us the way to the guest house owned by the rafting company.  We got there, faffed a while, faffed some more, then finally someone turned up at the house to tell us that there wasn’t any electricity and we should go to the hotel further up the road.

Brown Lemur

After dropping off our stuff at the hotel we were taken to a pizzeria which was the furthest restaurant away and didn’t do pizza.  It was a decent place though and sold cheap Zebu (Ox) and rice.  Like everywhere else, it also sold very big bottles of “Three Horse Beer” (THB) which did a good job of de-stressing us.  As we ate we watched the geckos running along the walls.  We then went to inspect the kayaks back at the guest house that we weren’t staying at.  We were led through the darkness to a small room with two inflatable kayaks, and nothing else.  We also found out that our plan had been changed and we would do a different river.  After unsuccessfully trying to call our contact who was arranging some of our logistics we returned to our hotel for more THBs and bed.  Before going to sleep Dan did manage to get through on the phone to find out that one of the Dagger Nomads was “Non operational”.  The other would be there in the morning and was in good condition.  He also managed to change our plan back to the original.  This seemed to be the theme in Madagascar.  Whenever we went more than a couple of hours without going over the plan it would suddenly change and we would spend the next couple of hours trying to change it back.

Dan paddling some slabs

We rose early the next day and went over to the house to check out the kayak.  True to his word, a new kayak had arrived in the night to replace the inflatable.  Unfortunately this Dagger Nomad was actually a Bliss-Stick Mystic giving us a problem.  There were two tall people and only one big kayak.  Rhod, with his smaller or more flexible legs drew the short straw and squeezed into the Mystic while I used the Nomad he had used for the first river.  We packed the kayaks, gave the guide instructions on where to meet us, asked for four wheel drive vehicles (which would be absolutely necessary for the next river) and set off for a multiday on the Faravory.  The Faravory had seen one descent before ours.  It was soloed, but none of the rapids had been attempted.

The view downstream from the put in

The drive to the river wasn’t too bad, once we finally got going.  We were first taken back to the guest house, then drove around for a while and then taken to the town hall.  Some time later we were finally travelling in the right direction.  The road was generally good, mostly tarmac with only the last couple of hours along a dirt track.  At one point we all got out to make the bus lighter to get over some particularly bad pot holes but most other holes had been partially filled with big rocks.  We reached a rickety old wooden bridge high above the Faravory, meandering over the sand far below us.  As we packed our kayaks a crowd gathered; a situation we were getting familiar with.

Locals panning for gold

At mid day we finally set off.  Like the Sahatandra, it was a wonderful feeling paddling under the bridge leaving the chaos of the towns and roads behind.  The first part of this river was completely flat and, worse, shallow.  We spent some time sliding our heavy kit laden kayaks over soft sand.  Looking down through the clear water we could see flakes, and sometimes small lumps, of gold glimmering in the sun.  It seemed like every corner we turned for the first few miles hid people panning for gold.  Entire families lined up in the river as the Dads in the front jammed huge wooden poles into the river bed and bounced on them to disturb the sand, hopeful that they would uncover a nugget.  The others, women and children, stood up to their waste scooping the disturbed sand in their wide metal pans.

Praying Mantis

Mandy picking her way down stream

After a while the river changed character and started to get steeper.  Like the Sahatandra it was horribly siphoned.  Unlike the Sahatandra, the rapids were good quality.  Fun and sometimes intense, but almost always easy to scout from the boat.  The first main rapid of the day was long and complicated ending in a big enclosed ramp with an unprotectable hole.  Anywhere else this would have been fine but here, with our heavy kayaks, so far from help and not wanting to risk getting our kit wet again, we walked it.  The portage was awful, first clambering through thick bushes then climbing over slippery rocks taking us far from the river.  We followed a small stream dropping steeply over and around big boulders.  Here I saw my first of many praying mantises of the trip.  I also saw other odd looking insects.  We passed our kayaks down a six foot waterfall into the shallow pool at the bottom where I saw frogs and even fish.  A little further along I got back into my kayak to cross a deeper pool, limboing under the spider webs disconcertingly low to the water.  After more than an hour we emerged back at the river.

Giant spiders.  This type was typically the size of a hand.

Me on a boof ledge

Some more rapids took us to our lunch spot where we ate bread above a terrific horizon line.  Here the river plunged over a thirty foot ledge which almost looked good if it wasn’t for the enormous hole between both tiers of the double drop.  This portage complete, the rapids picked up and as we learned how these heavy boats handled our confidence grew.  Jo bagged the first descent of a small ledge drop, with a worrying cave behind the curtain, by pulling off a stylish flare against the far wall.  This was a good confidence builder helping us realise we could still throw these heavy boats around.

Siphon!

Not wanting to risk paddling in the dark we stopped reasonably early to camp at a small uneven grassy patch which even had some wood for a fire.  As soon as we arrived we were being watched.  A group of about thirty people came and sat about twenty feet away to stare.  They stared as we changed, as we pitched our tents, as we cooked, as we ate and as we sat around the fire.  When we woke in the morning they still sat and stared, and they stared until we paddled off out of sight.

Packing up on our first morning, with an audience

 All of the photos on this page were taken by Jo Meares.