The sisterhood of the travelling paddles
A canoe trip makes for some rapid bonding for high-school girls.
THERE is something almost hypnotising about watching the landscape through a bus window, especially when the vegetation decreases in size from trees to long grasses to nothing higher than 30cm and finally nothing but sand and rocks, as the landscape between Cape Town and Namibia typically does. Twenty teenage girls from St Anne’s, St Mary’s and Epworth and I, along with our teachers, had been awake since 4.30am that day and had been on a bus for 10 hours. We just wanted to be in Namibia. Our destination was Felix Unite base camp, 10 minutes on the other side of the Namibian border. Our plan was to paddle 68km in five days down the Orange River.
I did not know many of my travelling companions as I was the only one in my grade from St Anne’s. I was also the youngest as the other seven girls were a grade above me. But the thing with a two-hour flight followed by a 10hour bus trip with your phone battery slowly dying, then waiting at the border post at 11pm, listening to a man play the harmonica, is that you soon know everything about everybody and are friends for life (or for the trip, at least).
We were all expecting to be woken up at 5am so we could start paddling in the cool of the morning and avoid most of the brutal Namibian heat.
To our surprise we had breakfast at 7am, casually packed our things and only started paddling at 10am. It seemed like utter madness to us and we all thought our guides were crazy to make us paddle in the middle of the day. Only when we stopped for lunch did we realise that our 48°C on the canoes was nothing compared to the 50°C plus on the river banks.
If anyone had looked down the river, they would have seen six girls sitting on lilos, huddled under a beach umbrella and eating their lunch in the middle of the river. This become our normal lunchtime reprieve from the sun.
Our guides constantly urged us to use sunscreen. “You don’t tan, you fry,” was the repeated phrase when anybody brought up the idea of going without coverage for the sake of the ultimate tan. Some, such as me, who go red in the presence of a lightbulb, took the advice to heart and regularly applied sunscreen up to 10 times an hour, while others slept rather uncomfortably at night with a lobster-red tinge to their flesh.
The scenery was nothing like the lush green of Hilton I was used to. The river wound its way through mountains that literally look “as old as the hills”. As a geography student, I was ever aware of the folds in the mountains, towering over the flat of the valley, which the river had, over millions of years, carved. Nothing grew on the mountains — they were just mounds of rock that had been sculpted by a giant’s hands. The only green was the vegetation snaking along the river. Paddling in between with the mountains on either side, I realised how small I really was in the bigger picture.
The evenings were my favourite. We would bath in the river and fall asleep watching shooting stars. There is nothing quite like sleeping under the stars on the banks of a river in a foreign country.
The biggest rapid we were to encounter would meet us on the morning of the third day. Before we reached it, we climbed up to an old mine and our guides showed us the rough position of the rapid, where the river narrows into a deep channel of fast-flowing water. Going through the rapid was an exhilarating rush with much screaming and shouting, but once we’d made it through, although a little wet, we all had a sense of accomplishment and felt we could do anything.
The other paddling days were spent with much laughter and fun. Too soon, we were waking at 4.30am to begin our long drive back to Cape Town. Not that I remember much of the journey as I was fast asleep on the shoulder of a girl, who, five days before, had been a stranger.
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We sat on lilos under a beach umbrella in the middle of the river to eat lunch out of the sun