White Water Rafting (WWR)

Aug 1st 2009
We all gathered at the bangalore city railway station on friday night.
Most of us finished dinner already, Few of us went for another round, ate some sandwiches in Comesum restaurant.Got into the train Shimoga Express (6227), chit chatted a while, went to the berth after the ticket verification. Elango woke up as per the train schedule and asked everyone to get ready as the train was supposed to reach Shimoga in 10 more minutes. I woke up, went to toilet, refreshed, then found out that the train was late by 1 hour. Few continued the sleep, few enjoyed the early morning breeze as the train crossed Bhatravati and other places. Soumya hit nostalgia, remembered about her school days. We reached shimoga, elango lost the TRAX driver number, called Adreno Dilip, got driver number again, found the TRAX, loaded our lugguage into it. One new friend, nagesh, joined us in the TRAX. His friends already reached agumbe one day ahead and waiting for him. We introduced ourself to nagesh and started playing coffee potting. As it was 7:30AM, We had idli vada, coffee in a restaurant in shimoga. Got back to TRAX, continued coffee potting and came up with cool limericks. We stopped by MandaGadde Bird santuary, passed by Agumbe, finally reached Hebri, the water rafting base camp at 11:30AM. We occupied the dormitory, refreshed us, few slept for an hour, lunch was ready by 1:15AM. Dilip ask us to eat enough food as the water rafting requires lot of energy. We all ate well :) and rafts came back after the morning ride.They pumped the air into the rafts, we picked our life jackets and helmets. Guide explained the basic commands to us. We boarded the rafts and got into water. for few minutes we practiced the commands and started our journey. I took my handy cannon camera, packed inside the dry bag provided by the guide. As we proceeded we used to the commands and got the synchronization among the rafters. Guide informed us about the places where we can get into water to swim across the river. We got into water for few minutes. I don't know the swimming, but It was too tempting. I jumped into water at three places keeping all my faith on the life jacket. It was an awesome experience.
The guide didn't allow me to take pictures at all for the first half of the journey. We took a small break, few more people joined us for the rest of the journey. For the second half, I changed the raft, the guide in the new raft was cool, he didn't say anything about the camera usage, I took my camera wherever it was possible, clicked some snaps, shooted some videos. Few fell off while crossing couple of rapids, everyone jumped into water as soon as the guide gave the signal for the swimming. Elango got hurt on a rock in a rapid while swimming :(, I and Poorvi was about to drifted away by the water into a wrong path when we were out in the water. We both didn't know swimming. Somehome managed to stay against the water flow, and got into the raft with the help of the pedal. It rained as we crossed dense forest areas. After 3 hours of enjoyment, the 26 kms of water rafting was over.




We came out, lifted the rafts on our head for half kilometer, kept it on the vehicle. I and hecate competed for the max push-ups on the ground. You know who would have lasted long, yes, ofcourse it was me :), although hecate gave a tough competition. Maruthu captured that in the camera. We walked back a km on the roads, another vehicle came for pickup. we reached the base camp, ate hot hot Aloo Bajji, few Capsicum Bajji, lots of Onion Bajji. refreshed ourself, had dinner, few went to sleep. We played cards, Luck was with me again, I won 3 or the 4 games we played. went to sleep on saturday. Sunday's activities worth a separate blog entry, will post it later.