A visit by the locals
A Village by the Sun Kosi Kevin is ready to go Old school canoeing
The kayaking and rafting are magic but that is not all there is in Nepal. The pool drop nature of the river lets us rest and look around. Plantations emerge in the rainforest and communities emerge.The overnight camping and a rest day provide time to visit these places and the people we saw were beautiful. Materially they have little, they have a hard life raising crops and animals while many of their men are away in the Middle East building football stadiums and skyscrapers but they never stop smiling and in the evenings some visit our camp. Others are known to our raft team and they barter with them for food, etc. When we leave they take away all of our plastic and tins, which they then reuse or recycle. In France we visited bars, spoke with the locals and shared the craic, but the Nepal experience is on a whole new and seriously thought provoking level.
We continue for a few more days.The Jaws, and Big Dipper rapids are a blast and Jungle Corridor – 10km of Class 4 water is very French.Then we have our very own thought provoking experience. GRG ring up and say they want to fly us out 24 hours early.There is to be a strike in the Nepali southern states on the Thursday we fly out and we will be stuck unless we leave on Wednesday.This is new! You don’t get this in France, well, not unless you are there when their farmers start blocking motorway exits as we were last summer! This is not funny for the Nepalese. India, their neighbour, was basically interfering again in Nepali politics and had closed the border for several weeks. All this was tied up with recent changes in Nepal’s constitution which did not suit India or the ethnically Indian southern Nepalese but that‘s another story. However, thanks to some hard paddling, the organisational skills of GRG in Kathmandu, our incredible raft team at the take out and a driver who knew the country lanes, which avoided the road blocks near the airport, we made it.
ThePADDLER 57