Madagascar: Planes, Trains and Automobiles

Photo courtesy of Dan Crowley.

I’m back from one of the most epic adventures of my life and over the next few blog posts I’ll tell you all about it.  The excitement started as soon as I got on the plane.  Due to some odd rules the plane and all its contents (including us) had to undergo insecticide treatment.  Decontamination complete we could enjoy the luxuries of Air France; red wine, good food and films.

Our bus

Arriving at Antananarivo airport was a different experience.  Passing though the chaos of passport control, then the chaos of baggage reclaim brought us to the chaos of arrivals where people pounced on us to helpfully wrestle our luggage out of our hands for “tips” to carry it to the car.  On the short journey to the house in Tana where we spent our first night we passed an ox cart in the dark, its silhouette illuminated by the blazing torches front and back sending glimmering embers dancing into the darkness.  What an amazing experience, and so different from the motorways over five thousand miles away.

About to set off on our first Madagascan river

In the morning we met our first guide, (man) Joe, who would be coming with us on the road.  We were also briefly acquainted with the plan that Rhod and Dan had conjured up.  They flew out a few days early and had intended to paddle a warm up river while Mandy, (girl) Jo and I would travel to Perinet.  That night we would meet them, stay in a guest house and in the morning set off for 2 days of good quality white water on the Sahatandra.  Oh the bliss of that long drive, still naively thinking that anything could go to plan in Madagascar.  Getting stopped by a drunk gun wielding police man demanding money should have been a warning.  Arriving late at night we reached the town of Perinet.  The narrow mud streets were difficult to drive in our minibus while looking for the others.  After a lap of town it was clear they weren’t there.  In the morning there still wasn’t any sign of them.  Conscious that we were working to a tight schedule for the entire trip, and crossing our fingers Rhod and Dan were on their way, the three of us set off downstream.

Someone doing their washing in the river at Perinet

It was a wonderful feeling leaving the crowds behind at Perinet.  It was even better looking ahead as the jungle grew thicker.  Huge palms towered over the thick trees.  Banana leaves poked out through the green.  Looking up, long webs hung over the river, each with a big fat black spider in the middle.

Mandy, somewhere on the Sahatandra

Jo punching a hole

The kayak I had rented was in very poor condition.  It may have been manageable on a short (and deep) day trip but for anything with rocks, or anything where the hull had to hold together it was completely unsuitable.  It was terribly oil canned, and at the edge of the big concave there was an cavernous hole that had been badly welded, possibly adding to the damage.  Half an hour in we reached the first small rapid and as expected the weld split.  Within 5 minutes I had to stop on a sandy bank to empty.  This set the theme of the day and although the water was reasonably easy, things were tough with a heavy water-filled kayak.  On top of that the river was horribly siphoned.  Madagascar suffers from violent floods every winter.  The immense volume of water crashing down the river moves everything, rolling house sized boulders along with the flow.  There wasn’t much rock that looked bedded in.  Just about every rapid contained at least one line that led under a boulder.  On most, the majority of the water led into big sumps.  It was always scary looking back upstream at the river above, seeing the water being squeezed out from beneath big boulder chokes.

Me on a rare bedrock rapid

The paddling was slow going.  Inspecting was tough and combined with constantly emptying the kayak we were way behind schedule.  Despite this, there were some decent rapids.  About half way along there was a long bedrock slide that led into a 90 bend with a huge cushion wave reflecting off the far wall.  When we arrived there were some children playing on the rocks at the top.  When we ran it the entire village turned out to watch.

That evening we stopped on a small sandy beach at about 5.00, an hour before dark, to give us time to light a fire and cook food.  We didn’t have a stove.  This was with the two who had gone AWOL but we intended to cook our cuscus on an open fire.  We didn’t have a tarp, this was with Dory who hadn’t arrived yet, and the tents were with Rhod and Dan wherever they had got to.  Fire lit we sat down to prepare our evening meal.  When I opened the dry bag containing the food, to my horror it had leaked and now contained a soggy mush with bits of cardboard that had once been a box and the two halves of my spork that had snapped.  The bread had gone the same way.  My clothes bag had also leaked so my sleeping bag and dry clothes were dripping wet.  These dry bags clearly didn’t cope well with being submerged for eight hours.

Packing up ready for the long walk out

To raise our spirits we spent half an hour chasing a large fish around the shallow pool it had got stranded in.  Despite our best efforts we weren’t getting grilled fish for tea that night.  Luckily, at some point around dusk we heard some shouts across the water.  The others had made it off their river (after taking 4 days rather than the estimated 2) and had taken a local bus to Perinet where they met Joe.  He then took them to the get out of our river where the three of them hiked along the railway line that followed the river until they saw us.  I was so happy to see them all, and I was happier still to see their heavy bags that they had carried, filled with camping gear, food and clothes.  That evening we ate rice and pesto, and sat around the campfire until way past our bed time (which, as we found out, was very early in Madagascar).  I borrowed a sleeping bag from Dan and was asleep in a tent before nine o’clock.

In the morning we packed up ready to walk out.  There was no way I was going to paddle the sinking boat another day, and if we wanted to reach the next river in time we had to finish today.  We followed the railway to the take out.  Out of sticks and kayaks we built a sled that could be dragged along the tracks and we alternated between pulling duties and the arduous job of correcting the sleds direction as it kept slipping off the rails.  After a few miles we saw our first train slowly chugging around the corner ahead of us.  Lifting the sled and kayaks as one we put it next to the tracks and pressed ourselves against the wall as the dirty metal rolled past us in billows of smoke, hauling its heavy cargo.

The next train was a bit more frightening.  We had reached a gorge, with the train line hugging the slope high above the river.  The sled was proving hard work to keep together and had already cut through the throw line we used to lash it together where the rope was rubbing against the rails.  It had also stopped raining so it wasn’t sliding as easily as the metal rails were drying out.  After another section of rope wore through we stopped to retie it.  Just as we set off again someone shouted “TRAIN”.  I turned around to see a train behind me with the gap quickly closing.  We grabbed the sled pulling it off the rails towards the drop into the gorge, braced ourselves, ducking low next to the tracks trying to hold the mass of wood and plastic to stop it sliding over the edge.  A split second later the train was passing, and one of the kayaks was going.  Sliding from the top of the pile it lightly skipped over the edge of the drop and quietly slid through the bushes out of sight.  Thankfully it stopped in the vegetation before going over the final drop where it could have escaped for good into the river over a hundred feet below.  Sending Jo to get it, she tied it to a rope so we could all haul it back up.  The sled had also taken a battering and desperately needed repairs.  After carefully retying all the knots another train passed.  Again the sled fell apart and this was the final straw.  Shouldering our boats we hiked the last part back to the village.

Tired, broken, hungry and thirsty we clambered back into the minibus.  Our bodies were beaten but not our minds.  This was only the warm-up and harder challenges were still to come...

All photos, unless stated otherwise are courtesy of Jo Meares

Madagascar - The Red Island

Top gorge of the Biasse

Since Norway I have had other adventures.  I got out to Corsica for the first time.  Levels were low but it was a brilliant trip; sleeping on the beach, driving over sketchy mountain passes looking down at the clouds over the edge of the cliff, remote paddling deep in inescapable gorges.  I have also been up to Scotland a few times and enjoyed wet weekends in Wales.  I even got on some new things in the French Alps where I paddled a short section of the Biasse higher than the usual put in.  Emerging from the narrow gorge I was greeted by the cheers of a coach full of people who had stopped their tour to gaze at the waterfalls.

Toms Excellent Corsica 2012 edit of our trip.  Tom Laws on Vimeo.

That’s my super quick whistlestop tour of 18 years of kayaking.  Now the history is done, what next?  At the end of the week I will be flying out to Madagascar.  There have only been a few expeditions to the island so unlike the journeys so far this one is very different.  I have no idea what lies ahead, other than it’s going to be intense.

View Larger Map

Madagascar is the fourth largest island in the world, so there is plenty to explore.  Were going in the Madagascan winter, so the paddling is likely to be the big volume type.  The steep creeks will be mostly dry, but the dirt track roads should be dusty rather than muddy allowing us to get to rivers that have not yet been explored.  Another advantage of going in the winter is that the crocodiles will be less active!

There are other worries too.  The Rabies virus is carried by the mammals of the island including Vampire Bats.  There are waterborne flesh eating parasites, the Plague, and other tropical diseases.  Last year’s cyclone left significant devastation, and was quickly followed by a locust swarm which decimated crops.  Most of the population live in poverty, with 90% of the population living on less than $2 per day.  On top of that there is political unrest, excaserbated by the government having postponed elections.

We're hiring kayaks from Gilles Gautier, a French raft guide living on the Island.  We're flying out paddles (and spares, because replacing broken ones in Madagascar will be impossible) and kayaking kit.  We’re going to be carrying everything in our kayaks, food, sleeping bags, cooking equipment, water purification pills.

So, in a few days, our team of 6 will be on the Red Island starting our expedition...

Summer in Norway

During the summer of 2011, between finishing my masters and getting a job I set off for a 6 week expedition to Norway.  The plan was simple; drive to Harwich and catch the ferry to Esbjerg.  Drive through Denmark, Sweden and up through Norway until we reached the Sjoa river.  In reality things were a little less straight forward and after getting lost we arrived in a different region at about three in the morning.  It didn’t matter, we got a couple of warm-up days paddling the easier rivers of Hedmark

So, over the next month and a half the three of us aimlessly roamed across Norway paddling amazing white water, sleeping outside and cooking on a small Trangia.  We sporadically met up with friends along the way, and paddled with random people we met on river.  The days that really stand out in my mind are not always the obvious ones, like the night we slept in a car park in Bergen after a rare evening in the city, because we were too cheap to pay the 200kr camping charge, and waking up after our lie in to find the locals staring at these odd foreigners in their sleeping bags.  Or sharing our “traditional British desert” of boiled chocolate pudding and a 10p sachet of ASDA custard with some people we met after they cooked us a filling and far more traditional sauerkraut variation.  Or running a half marathon to get the car after finishing the surprisingly exciting canyon on the Driva, or emerging from a long and tiring days kayaking to find a group of German boaters on the bank who had made us a cup of tea laced with rum to take the cold away.

The infamous Money Drop

 Of course there are also the obvious happy memories too.  Running the Money Drop, named after the first decent where the sponsors of the Voss Extreme Week stumped up some cash for anyone who paddled the waterfall during the festival.  The feeling of joy after reaching the end of the Myrkdalselvi after heavy rain had swelled the flows.  A real highlight for me was completing the Gråura where the river chews its way through a 250m deep gorge, with three Germans I met the night before.  We celebrated this one with a homemade sauna on the sandy beach in a clearing of the trees somewhere near the Ulvåa.

A rest day

We took a “rest day” to go climbing on the island of Ågotnes.  I slept on top of the cliff that night, on a big granite rock surrounded by heathers, overlooking a deep blue lake and beyond that, the North Sea. In Norway at this time of year, it never really gets dark.  There is a brief period of dusk where the sun dips behind the mountains tricking unsuspecting travellers into thinking it’s night, before cruelly emerging again to spite the tired.  We lost track of time.  Hours merge into days, into weeks.  We slept when we were tired and kayaked when we were not.  We ate when we were hungry and drank when we were thirsty.  The necessities.  The fishing was always good and even if my catches were small they tasted exceptional.

Room with a view!

Rhod, nailing the line.

Not all days were so idyllic.  We spent a few days at what appeared to be a rubbish dump near a deserted army barracks which turned out to be a convenient base for some of the steep rivers nearby.  On our last night there we woke to heavy rain, and the Brandsetelvi which was nothing more than a trickle the night before had swelled to a raging torrent.  By the time the rain had stopped the river had risen about ten feet.  We took another rest day here, a real one this time, and visited a swimming pool in Voss to soak our aching bodies, now tired from weeks of constant activity.

Andrews attempt at the first descent

At some point along the journey I met up with some friends from home and we set off in search of a first descent.  As Andrew Coultherd , Chris Griffiths and myself spend four hours climbing into a deep gorge in the mist of an enormous waterfall we got a valuable lesson in perspective.  The “easy” rapids Andrew had spied from the top of a mountain turned out to be miles of continuous white water, flowing over, under and through razor sharp rocks pummelling it’s long course through the gorge to eventually reach the fjord.  As we approached the “small drops” they became lethal monstrosities with tonnes of water ploughing over the edge and boiling up thirty feet downstream in huge recirculating cauldrons of no escape.  Lesson learned; small, or far away!  After spending another couple of hours inspecting the gorge we couldn’t find any eddies above the drops and didn’t fancy our chances on the other rapids either so we had to abort.  We did manage to paddle about 50 foot of river.  Andrew did a little further, down to a shallow ledge where I was stood up to my knees to “catch” him.  Sufficient pay back for a trip to Scotland where we paddled a fast rising Moy Burn, miles above the guidebook section, where I was stuck on the wrong side of the river blocked in by a super smooth rock slab angled at 70 degrees.  I managed to escape by climbing up Andrew like a ladder, while he was lying flat on the rock with both hands holding on to the top of the slab.  So, favour repaid, we started the four hour climb back out of the gorge.  It was a long day for so little kayaking, but worth the adventure.  You can’t always be lucky!

Nicki, punching through the hole

Equally, the good rivers weren’t all plain sailing either.  We had our share of swims and these were usually memorable ones.  My first was pretty tame.  I snapped my paddles on the thirty footer on the Jordalselvi and failed to hand roll.  My second was quite different.  We arrived at the Rauma to find a good flow.  The others weren’t so keen so I decided to go it alone, with Rhodri Anderson and Nicki Turton as bank support.  At some point while I was walking the long path into the gorge, some other kayakers driving past noticed a car with a kayak unracked and came for a look.  They carried my paddle to help me walk across the narrow ledge to the top of the first waterfall, then held my kayak for me to get in.  Although I didn’t “style it”, my line saw me through and the huge cheer from the crowd that had now gathered was inspiring.  The next waterfall was a different story.  Keen to avoid the massive tow back of the Ulvåa river crashing down a rocky ramp from the left I pushed right too hard, and as the river swung left above the fall it pushed me dangerously close to the wall.  Losing momentum I flopped pathetically over the lip, putting enough of a boof stroke in to keep my bow up (just) and pointing towards the river right eddy.

Moments from the beating of my life!

Despite landing in the right place, I had no speed and the column of water pushing down on my right edge caused me to resurface upside down.  Even so, I thought I had made it.  The turbulent water in the pool below felt like it was ripping me apart and I couldn’t get any purchase with the paddle to roll.  In fact I couldn’t even reach the surface and time and time again my roll failed.  I started getting worried about going over the next drop upside down.  Then, I felt air on my hands and had my first good shot at a roll.  Just as I pulled on my paddle I felt water drumming down on me and had the horrible moment of realisation that I wasn’t approaching the next drop.  I wasn’t even fighting the boils downstream.  I was right where I landed, in the hole under the waterfall.  As I started pushing myself out of my kayak to swim for it the water felt calm, briefly, then the river ripped me from the seat tumbling me down.  Everything dimmed to a dark green with the waterfall just a deep rumble far away.  I brushed the riverbed with my toes and in a moment of foolishness I kicked off back to the surface.  I was racing back to the air, towards a breath, towards colour, but before I reached it the lights went out and I was slammed flat on my back against the floor.  The river picked me up and threw me again against the rock in the pitch black.  As I curled up in a ball I bounced along the bottom, then started going up towards the surface again, this time with the rising column of water.  Darkness turned back to a deep green and then I saw sunlight glimmering through the surface.  I emerged far downstream on the right of the huge boil which kicked me towards the rocky bank where I sat a while in the shallow water catching my breath.  The moment I pulled my deck the thought popped in to my head that I would never see my boat and paddle again.  Luckily they were still where I had left them, getting beaten in the tow back of the falls.  I have no idea how Rhod and Nicki got them out, but by the time I had the strength to get up, my boat and paddle were lying on the bank.

Fun times on the Valdølla

Dropping into the 5th Ulla waterfall.

6 weeks after leaving the UK we started the long journey home.  I never miss the comfort of home until I’m so close to getting there.  The last night in a tent was tough.  Every part of me ached and I longed for a bed, an oven, a cold beer, and most of all, darkness after the constant light of a Scandinavian summer.  I don’t think there are many feelings as rewarding as that journey home, knowing that we made it and tomorrow our survival won’t depend on maintaining complete mental focus and one hundred percent concentration.

Me, dropping through a huge hole in the mountain.

Andrew, deep in the Strondalselva gorge.

Flying on the Jordalselvi

First of the tightly packed Ulla Falls - skins weather!