Nepal Travelog: Getting intimate with the Kali Gandaki

The Kali Gandaki river begins its long journey to the Ganges from the glaciated heights of the Tibetan-Nepali border. If you ever hike the Annapurna Circuit, it is the river that flows down the west side of the massif, at first wide and shallow through the dusty Mustang badlands, then funnelled into a frenzy as it passes through its eponymous gorge. By some estimates, this is the world's deepest canyon, and certainly the river predates the Himalayas, having cut down through successive geological strata as the flanking bulk of the Annapurna and Dhaulagiri ranges were levered upward under tectonic pressure. As a result, the river is a prime site for fossil hunters, the devout among whom have long revered the image of Cretaceous era ammonites as a non-living form of Vishnu.

Back in Pokhara, my Indian friends and I spent exactly one morning and one afternoon indulging in the facilities of this vaguely Italian looking lakeside town before signing up for a rafting trip on the Kali Gandaki. In the office of the operator, I again sat back and tried to copy the body language of my Indian friends, who looked and spoke like they went rafting every weekend. I by contrast had no idea what to expect, save that the vessel would not look much like the Kon-Tiki. And this was all to the good, since I know very well the things that I know - travelling in Greece, hiking in the European mountain ranges, teaching English as a foreign language and all things pertaining to the Victorian man of letters, Samuel Butler. It is what I don't know that I now feel a great need to learn.

The next morning we all piled into a cramped minibus designed for Asian frames and rattled off once more along the potholed and twisting roads of Nepal, taking in the truly surreal prospect of the Annapurna range rising fully 7,000 metres above the height of the town. For a while I played camera keekaboo with the soaring pinnacle of Machapuchere as it intermittently revealed itself between the concrete canyons and sagging power cables of the city outskirts. Then I simply downed my camera and let the fleeting pleasure of the mountain's image fall past my eyes like water through an open hand - and old lesson, learned afresh in Nepal.

Two hours of sleep deprivation later, and we finally stopped by a bend in the Kali Gandaki to kit up, inflate the rafts and get some instruction on just what the next two days would involve. Our instructor as it turned out was of Thai parentage, and built like an Asian Kuros, a charming blend of modesty, power and grace. Again, I tried to copy the Indians, as they nodded in appreciative agreement with each of his instructions, though I was having more difficulty finding a convincing way of completing his hanging sentences.

And so, we pushed off, and began that long process of trial, error, observation and adjustment which I guess all crews pulling together have to go through -- though we in particular had to look smart about it. Within 20 minutes we were paddling into the throat of the most challenging rapid of the entire route. A grade fiver by the name of 'big brother', it spun us around toward an overhanging rock which I only narrowly missed on a well-timed command from all hands to duck. All great fun, and certainly a tasty appetizer for what was to come.

At midday, we stopped on a sandbank for lunch. The canyon walls were high, with narrow trails zipping off through the foliage flanking the sands. Afterwards, as the crew were washing and packing up, I strolled down one these as far as an overgrown and thoroughly romantic statue of a Hindu deity, which I proudly identified as Shiva on account of his trident prop. 15 Roupees and some marigolds lay under a stone at his feet.

Soon after hitting the river again, the weather turned sultry, with thick cloud and a sharp drop in atmospheric pressure which you could feel as a tingling in your finger tips. Somewhere close, an electrical storm was pounding the hillside. We entered calm water and drifted under oppressive skies past tumbling waterfalls with monkeys silently eyeing us from overhanging foliage. 'This feels a lot like Apocalypse Now', I remarked to my fellow paddlers, though of course we were hopefully headed away from any heart of darkness.

I cannot remember what the rapid was called, but I do remember the pilot later admitting that it had dunked both him and his entire crew only days before. We got off more lightly, with only three of our number getting intimate with the Kali Gandaki. Normally, I wouldn't have been able to tell you how it all happened, but thanks to an occupant's helmet camera, it is now a scene that I have literally replayed time and time again.

As we approached the rapid, the pilot steered us into a funnel of churning water just before a huge boulder. As we hit it this, we were all paddling hard, and unable to anchor ourselves to the vessel with anything other than the tips of our toes wedged under the seat in front. And then we bounced, as if striking an underwater boulder, and the raft at first crashed back onto the river before rolling violently to the left, the side at which I was sitting. And then all was foam and shadows for what seemed like a very long time indeed.

Before setting off, we were told to grab hold of the runner ropes in the event that we should fall in. Somehow, I remembered this and reached up, groping with my right hand until at last I found them and was able to pull myself up and out of the foaming water. A true white knuckle experience.

In the video at this point, you get a great shot of me, both arms thrown over the side of the raft, breathing hard and unable quite to focus, while in the background, the pilot, who also got dunked, and who was tossed much further from the raft than any of us, elegantly and swiftly freestyles himself back and onto the vessel. Somehow, this snapped me out of my daze and convinced me that I could do the same, though I quickly realised just how difficult it is to extract oneself from churning rapids in the direction of a drifting raft. And so my Indian friend with the helmet camera hauls me up by both straps of my life jacket, and I flop onto the raft like a landed fish.

As he continues to look at me, I slowly crawl to the side of the raft, now drifting through calmer water, wipe the water off my face and break into huge fits of laughter.

Normally, we avoid risk and uncertainty, and mostly this is the correct and sensible thing to do. But there is an equal and opposite risk for some of us that we become so accustomed to the familiar that our senses become dulled, and we can no longer take an elemental pleasure in the sensuality of the world:

To see a world in a grain of sand,

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

And eternity in an hour.

Viktor Shklovsky, a Soviet literary critic, called this gradual dulling of the senses 'habitualisation' and describes it as if it were a ravenous monster ''devouring work, clothes, furniture, one's wife'' and even ''the fear of war''. For Shklovsky, the redeeming power of art was that it allowed one to ''recover the sensation of life'' by imparting ''the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known''. ''Art exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony'', Shklovsky famously stated.

For me, there is a clear parallel between risk and adventure on the one hand and the rejuvenating power of art on the other. Whenever I climb to the top of a mountain, even on a dull day, I look around and see the world as if presented in the form of a novel hypothesis.

Now is the right time to take risks, to explore the unfamiliar and to get far enough from my habits and routines to feel the pressure and pleasure of the elements of the world... even if it means getting intimate with the Kali Gandaki.