On the River Again

Our trip leaders cooked us dinner over a fire when the rain let up. We sat on a matted floor in a circle under the larger tent, with a bowl of white rice in front of each of us and bottles of boiled and cooled river water spread out amongst us. In the middle were bowls and bowls of food. They made me my own bowl of scrambled eggs since I wasn’t eating meat, and there were fried tofu and soy beans and a delicious vegetable curry. It was the vegetable curry I’d been wanting the whole trip but could never have anywhere else because it was always too spicy. It was a wonderfully filling dinner.

After we ate, we moved back to the smaller tent and played card tricks, matchstick games, and silly laughing games that I probably wouldn’t do any justice describing. In any case, it was a fun evening. The rain continued falling but I stayed dry and it wasn’t cold outside. Amar was right about his promise that there would be no mosquitoes at the campsite.

I was one of the first to wake up in the morning and I met Hendri down by the riverside. We sipped some tea and talked as the sun came up. Breakfast was sandwiches of scrambled eggs and tomato on fried toast, served on forest leaves, and watermelon and pineapple drizzled with passionfruit. Once we had eaten, we commenced on a difficult, barefoot journey less than a kilometer away to a waterfall. We had to cross the raging river twice to get there. Rick, the man from Holland, led me across the first time (the current was too strong for me to make it across by myself), and one of the rafting guides in the other group gave me a piggy-back ride across the second time. Hendri strung everyone’s cameras around his neck to make it across, which seemed like a risky move to me, but they all stayed dry.

 

 
The waterfall was cold for swimming, but I went in anyway, since I was already wet from crossing the river. After a while, we went to sit on some large rocks in the sunshine, and Haidir made us crowns of fern leaves and painted our faces with red mud. When we had dried off in the sunlight, it was time to get wet again, and I was ferried across the river in a tube and then led across by holding Haidir’s hand and literally floating behind him. We had noodle soup for lunch and packed up. My clothes, which had been soaking wet that morning, were completely dry now on the rocks where I had spread them, and butterflies collected on my undies.

All of our belongings were packaged into large plastic garbage bags and strapped to our raft, which was made of four inner tubes lashed together. None of this looked trustworthy and I worried that everything I had brought with me would be soaked. But Haidir and Hendri seemed confident about it. Once our gear was strapped in, we got into the raft. Haidir sat in front and another guide in back, and Malone, Emily, Rick, and I shared the two center tubes. It wasn’t exactly comfortable, but it wasn’t a long ride back into town. The trip downriver was exciting, especially because I had never been rafting before. There were a couple of slow spots on the river, but overall, it was a bumpy ride. Our guides used long wooden poles to steer us away from rocks, and at one point, they turned the raft around so we were floating backwards.

The sun was out, the sky was blue, the river was topped with small, white waves, and to either side of the river, the trees rose up like giants. There were people hiking along the shore or sitting by the river and every person we passed smiled and waved. It was such a refreshingly friendly place. We floated and bumped our way back into town, where we found that our things had, indeed, stayed dry, and we temporarily parted with our guides and went back to Nora’s for a shower and a nap.