For adventure loving outdoor types, going white water rafting, waterfall rappelling, trekking etc in the monsoons is almost mandatory. So, with much anticipation and publicity (to collect a big crowd that would enable us to avail of a 17% discount!!!) we set out – 41 people in 7 cars, for a white water rafting adventure
The adventure actually started on Saturday itself, with the organizer telling me how strict he was about the 8:30 am reporting time and how leaving Mumbai at 6 am was too late and we should leave at 5 am …. Well, it was too late for me to undertake changing the schedule of 41 people who were collecting at various designated pickup spots from locations ranging from Goregaon to Thane to Nerul. So, to save time, I googled to find out the phone number of Kshanbhar Vishranti, our breakfast spot. Of course, the number published on the net was outdated, but luckily, they had a Mumbai office number as well, which was valid. Rang them up, got the number of the highway outfit, spoke to some guy there who hemmmmed and hawed about how they only start serving at 7:45 – 8am, and if his cooks worked hard to prepare this by 7:15 am for us, what was he going to do with 45 vada pavs and 20 kanda pohas and 45 teas if we didn’t turn up …. When my assurances didn’t seem to be working, I finally told him to give me a yea or nay, and if it was a nay, I would just make alternative arrangements, he wasn’t doing me any favors! That worked – why is it that dadagiri is needed for every little thing? Is it that on a Sunday morning, this place was not confident of being able to find consumers for 45 vada pavs and 20 kanda pohas if we didn’t turn up? Unbelievable!
But of course, if dadagiri is what is called for, yours truly is well capable of delivering to expectation, and so breakfast was duly pre-ordered, messages communicated to at least 1 person per car to pass on their respective car loads especially kids, that this was the inflexible arrangement and since we needed to stop there for a bio-break anyway (they do have decent loos – clean and plentiful number of stalls), we would take a short 10 minute break there for breakfast and loo, and head off immediately after.
Sunday morning – amazingly, everyone was on time and the only tension was about rendezvousing at the designated spots and not losing cars en route. We reached McDonalds pretty much as scheduled, at 7:05 instead of 7:00, and picked up the last car that came from Thane. After that is when the challenge started …. The big learning for me – it is just about impossible to try and manage a 7 car cavalcade, unless you establish a following pattern! We kept having some drivers speed up and some slow down for whatever reason, and it became a huge coordination exercise constantly trying to check if any car had gone missing. Next time (if at all I summon up the courage to have a next time!) I will tell each driver who s/he follows and who s/he keeps an eye on in the rearview – that’s the only way a cavalcade as large as this one can work. Second learning – to keep sedans between SUVs – for example, if I have a Xylo following me, there’s no way I can keep an eye on the sedans (or even an SUV) behind the Xylo!!! So, great – 2 big learnings for that alternative career (or post retirement career) in adventure sport organization!
Against an 8:30 am reporting time, by 9:15 we were someplace really close as we could tell from the odd signages we saw on trees and walls and when we saw a dirt track with an arrow saying Kundalika Rafting camp, I congratulated myself on reaching by 9:30 at least and happily turned down it. We reached, and were told by the guy there that we’d reached the end point and the start point was a further 14 Kms down the main road. What fun – 7 cars had to reverse on a dirt track and make it back to the main road, drive a further 14 Kms and find the other dirt track road that would lead us to the start point. And of course, there were just about no signages to show us the way. The scenery was great – being the monsoon, everything was really green, more shades of green than one could imagine existed (Asian Paints’ “mera wala cream” comes to mind), but I had strict instructions from the motley crew in my car that I was to keep my eyes on the road and not participate in the conversation or car games that were being enjoyed. I tell you – some people treat their drivers so badly – and even worse when they’re not even paying the driver a salary or giving a tip!
So at 10 am, we finally reported at the starting point, and after the usual milling around and loo breaks and so on, we got briefed and kitted up (life jackets, helmets, paddles) before the 41 of us were formed into 3 groups of 9 and 2 groups of 7. Mine was a most interesting group – we had 2 shrinks, an aspiring chain gang supervisor, an IT consultant (and you know how consultants are), an aspiring architect, a concrete specialist, a movie maker, a yoga instructor and an aspiring sergeant major! The chain gang supervisor kept insisting the consultant wasn’t really rowing hard enough and the consultant, like all consultants, was most offended at her efforts not being duly appreciated and recognized through the payment of large fees. The movie maker looked dreamy, presumably dreaming about how he would have cast this as a movie and who he would cast as the bikini clad heroine, until he was sternly instructed to get rowing. I am scared to speculate on what the shrinks were thinking – not only would they have drawn conclusions about the rest of us (and each other), but they just might psycho analyze my writings here and I shudder to think what they might come up with …. Once in a while, I am wise and diplomatic – not often, but since I’m having one of those moments now, let us respect it with 2 minutes of silence
When asked earlier, I’d told people the time on the river lasts about an hour. Luckily, I’d also made the disclaimer that you lose sense of time on the water, so it was quite a shock to discover that we actually spent some 2-3 hours on the river. The rapids were good – not quite as violent as the ones up north (Rishikesh, Teesta, Manali), but quite enough to get you drenched and give you a thrill. And of course, quite enough for the chain gang supervisor and army sergeant major to get on everybody’s case, giving the shrinks lots of material for their future memoirs on the crazy folks they’ve known and the movie maker ideas about what makes life interesting
We went through all the rapids (they say there are 12, but none of us counted – some of them are really small ones, and some follow one another so quickly, you’re not sure whether they’re supposed to be counted as one rapid or two) in probably something like an hour or an hour and a quarter. One rapid, we almost got stuck on top of a rock which had its top barely protruding through the water, but luckily the force of the water pushed us through. We heard later that another raft got stuck and then some complex maneuverings and rescue operations by the kayak had to be effected to get them free. All in all, it was a very smooth trip, in that nobody got thrown out of their raft and none of the rafts flipped. And then we reached the calm part of the river, where we were allowed to float. Promptly, everyone in our raft dropped into the water, even the sole non-swimmer, gutsy as she was, boldly got into the water putting her faith in her life jacket and her husband (or should I say husband and life jacket in that order?) and we all floated serenely down the river.
Throughout, we were really lucky with the weather – no rain during the drive down (which was a blessing, else keeping track of seven cars with poor visibility would have been an impossible task). And as we rafted, we got cloudy weather, some instances of misty to drizzly rain and finally, as we floated, it was just quiet and cloudy. Beautiful and meditative – this is what we wanted when we escaped from Mumbai! The only hitch in this picture – we were all getting really hungry – the vadas and kanda poha from breakfast were a distant memory and paddling through the rapids had taken the stuffing out of us. Of course, in any such trip, you have some really demanding customers, and as luck would have it, I had one of those in my raft – she wanted me to bring her an ice-cold Pepsi on the rocks, while she sexily floated on the river, no doubt imagining herself to be floating down the Rivera with a sexy young Frenchman waiting on her! She got a helmet-full of river water from me, and a earful of rude names as well!
In no time at all, we were summoned back into the raft, where all of us made inelegant landings, except for our dreamy moviemaker, who in one smooth move managed to hoist himself into the raft …. Guess there were some muscles under those dreamy looks after all! And then came the hardest part of the trip – paddling that last mile of calm water when all you want to do is have some hot tea / hot soup / smooth whisky and enjoy the ache of tired muscles and flowing adrenaline. Somehow, despite being the last to set out, we’d ended up the first to land, and we promptly hoisted our raft onto our shoulders (remember, we had the chain gang supervisor still on our case) and marched up the slope to the top of the river bank. Then it was a matter of collecting my car keys from the driver who’d brought my car down, finding a secluded spot to park it and using it for everyone to change in turn. Some of us who were too impatient to wait our turn, just went behind the bushes and changed. And of course, now it was time for nature to have her fun with us – no sooner had I changed into dry clothes, the skies opened up and a deluge came down, and …. The umbrella and jacket were in the car, which was being used as a changing room by someone! Oh well, all part of the fun …. But no, the real fun was yet to begin:
We now had a situation where 4 cars were at the ending point and 3 cars were at the starting point. The original plan had been that we would take one of the cars at the ending point to ferry the drivers of the 3 cars to the starting point and bring the cars down while the others finished changing. But with all the time computations going awry and having to wait till the rain slowed down a bit, we realized that that would add at least an hour to our reaching Mumbai back. So Singh is King came up with the wonderful idea of using the cars we had like truly rural cars. The two cars that had come with their own chauffeurs loaded up their respective loads and set off for Mumbai. That left 29 people, who had come distributed in 5 vehicles. We now loaded them into 1 Innova and 1 Ford Endeavour – we had the boots open and people perched on them, we had a couple of people sitting on the carrier on top – the Innova carried 15, the Ford 14 and we crawled 14 Kms to the place where the other 3 cars had been left parked! Once again, the nature gods were good to us and we didn’t have any rain.
Once we reached the starting point, all was comfortable - we redistributed ourselves into our respective cars and headed back to Mumbai. The return trip, we encountered a lot more rains, ranging from gentle drizzles to torrential downpours, but no single episode lasting too long. We gorged on the eats and drinks various people had carried – chips, sandwiches, candies, chocolates …. And discovered this absolute freak of nature we’d been harbouring in our midst all day – a teenager who loves to keep things clean! We promptly knighted her The Lady of Trash and ceremoniously handed every little scrap of trash we generated to her, for safely stowing away in her plastic trash bag. And this was when one of our shrinks started getting calls about a patient he needed to visit in Hinduja. So, since our car now had pretty much the same group as in our raft, we agreed that when we stopped for lunch, we would order whatever could be served quickly, eat it and run without waiting for the rest of the group, so that he could go visit his patient before it got too late.
Finally, when all of us were on the verge of eating even the trash up, we reached Kamat Residency and as planned, ordered what we were promised would be delivered quickly, though none of these highway places seem to have caught the Mumbai – time is money kind of attitude. Their idea of quickly is any self-respecting Mumbai Udupi’s idea of slow (susegad – Goa ishtyle). Anyway, we ordered first, and while we were waiting for it to be served, Singh, the King came to socialize with his subjects. He was amazed how everyone at our table seemed to know everyone else so well, and was so comfortable with each other, and being the king, wanted to know how it was so. Of course, he couldn’t be told it was the magic wrought by yours truly – I mean, how tame is that as an answer, right? So our chain gang supervisor spun him a tale about how someone’s cousin was married to her brother in law, and how someone else had been in school with her and …… net-net – how everybody was related to everybody else (sarva vasudheya kutmumb), until the King got thoroughly confused about who knew whom and how and wandered off to find a saner table. Having had our cheap thrills with that, we grabbed the first food that was served and ran, reaching Vashi around 6 pm and Hinduja a little before 7:30 pm. Not bad at all, considering the others were crossing Sion at 8 pm.
A long day, we were all exhausted, but euphoric, and by 9, all of us were in our respective homes, safe and smiling. Except for the shrink – who knows when he got home, and whether his prescription for his patient was (as all his consultant specialists in the car advised) - a white water rafting trip!
Where: Kundalika river in Kolad – Vile village. This is essentially a river created by the Tata Power Plant at Bhira. When they open the sluice gates of the dam, the river gets a good rush of water, augmenting its natural flow, and the terrain makes it a great place for white water rafting. The drive from Bandra to this place took 4 hours, including a breakfast-bio break and a couple of wrong turns. Distance was some 180 Kms from Bandra
When: Sunday, July 18, 2010
Who: Some 41 strong crowd, ages ranging from about 11 (hush, age limit is actually 15 and above) to early 50s. But once on the water, we were all age 10 and less!
Why: Because it’s good to get an adrenaline rush when you can escape from Mumbai, and there’s no time like the monsoons for such things
Why no photos: Because you can’t take a camera on the river – it might fall overboard even if it is a waterproof one and carrying along a camera for onshore photos seemed tame, especially when you consider that you need to leave it at risk of getting stolen from the parked car
Organizer: Kundalika White Water Rafting: Ravi Kumar - +91 99860 31762 or Ravi Nayak - ravikumar_mailme@yahoo.co.in
