It’s late afternoon on the longest river on Earth – the original source of human civilization. We’re just outside of Jinja, Uganda, and the dark, billowing clouds of an impending thunderstorm are moving far too quickly for comfort.
Normally, I love a good storm. But today, we just happen to be rafting the Nile in Uganda, and we’ve already gone swimming on more than a few occasions. It’s… not usually my style to be hanging out in large bodies of water during a lightning storm. Call me boring.
“Storm’s coming!” Our Ugandan raft guide shouts, “Have to start paddling fast! Next is the bad place, so we have to paddle very hard!”
I feel the adrenaline rise inside of me. Rapids are rated on a scale from Class 1 to 5, with Class 5 as the most dangerous and difficult. They – maybe jokingly – call The Bad Place a Class 6. But one way or another, it’s the most difficult part of the river, and we were bearing down on it while a storm was bearing down on us.
The thing about The Bad Place is that it’s a crazy vortex that you have to paddle incredibly hard to avoid while the entire volume of the Nile is crashing and swirling into it like a drain. If you don’t escape its pull, the raft will flip, and the rotating current will secure it in place on top of the vortex, with a real possibility of trapping you underneath when it does. I’ve gone whitewater rafting before. But it’s never been anything like this.
We hit the beginning of The Bad Place, and we can hardly hear our guide over the roar of the river. He angles us the right way, facing across the river instead of down, and he shouts at the top of his lungs, “ALL FORWARD! HARD HARD HARD HARD HARD!” I’m on the right side of the raft – the downriver side – and closest to the vortex. We’re making progress against the current, but it’s not enough. I can see the raging maelstrom of The Bad Place getting closer and closer as we try to skirt around its leftmost edge. There’s only time for an instant’s realization that we’re not going to make it when the water overtakes me.
I’m a rock climber. I’m a world-traveler and adventure-seeker. Risk is one of the central elements of my life. So, too, is the recognition and assessment of what does or doesn’t constitute an acceptable level of risk. I do take risks, but I don’t consider myself reckless. I’m definitely not an adrenaline junkie. The odds of me jumping off a cliff without having tested the depth of the ocean below me is near zero. But if I’ve scoped out the landing and found it to be deep and free of rocks? Oh, you can bet your sweet ass I’m gonna fly.
But that’s the difference between reckless and reasonable. So many of us are afraid of things we shouldn’t be. Preparation and experience can help us be entirely safe in situations that others, those who are NOT as prepared or experienced, may see as insanely stupid. If you’ve seen the movie Free Solo, you probably think Alex Honnold is a certified lunatic to be scaling a 3,000 foot cliff face without a rope. But he doesn’t solo a route until he’s done it WITH a rope dozens and dozens (if not hundreds) of times. He has nearly two decades of climbing experience, and his brain handles fear differently from the vast majority of us.
Now, I’m no Alex Honnold – but there are risks that I’ve evaluated thoroughly, and that I’m willing to take. To save money, I got my vaccinations in Rwanda instead of beforehand at a travel clinic in the US, as James did. Doing so saved me hundreds and hundreds of dollars (and the medications are exactly the same). I also stopped taking my Malaria medication after one night because it drove my brain wild. I couldn’t sleep and my mind was making the weirdest mental associations that kept me up all night. Trading protection from a potential illness for being so tired I couldn’t enjoy the adventure was just not worth it to me. Especially since my travel insurance would cover medical evacuation if necessary.
Renting a car in cash, trusting Ugandan strangers with our car keys overnight, or rafting the Nile and trusting our Nalubale Rafting guides to keep us safe on one of the hardest sets of rapids in the world – it’s all just a part of the experience.
I have no idea how long I spent underwater. Time slowed. What felt like an eternity may have been only twenty to thirty seconds, but I just don’t know. Fortunately, I have one of those brains that doesn’t panic in crisis. Instead, it goes into what I call “checklist” mode. I slow down, I go through the things I’m supposed to do, and the adrenaline lets me solve the problem instead of losing control. I specifically remember telling myself to relax and… chill… as I held my breath and waited to break through the surface of the raging river. It was a very yin and yang kind of moment. I was calm, but yeah. I was scared.
After what felt like forever, as my subaqueous zen was finally starting to crack, I break through the surface. Air. I look around and see a raft close by. Thank God. And I start swimming towards it as hard as I possibly can. It’s not my raft, and I have no idea where James is, but this is home now. I get pulled up into the raft and I collapse for a moment, attempting to catch my breath and regain my composure.
The respite didn’t last long.
Not thirty seconds after making it into this new raft, it flips. My already beleaguered body is back into the drink for round two, and this time, my wits are pushed to their absolute limit. This is what true fear feels like. I’m too tired. My heart rate is still sky-high. This is what it feels like to be looking your mortality square in the eyes.
Don’t. Fucking. Blink.
Again, I finally break the surface and find a short, staggered gasp of air. But it only lasts for a moment. My world is dark and… far too yellow. Shit. I’ve found an air pocket under the raft, but I’m still just that – UNDER the raft. I absolutely have to get myself out as fast as possible. I need to be able to BREATHE. This isn’t over.
I don’t really remember how. And again, I don’t know how long it took, but eventually, I reached an arm around and found a tie-line on the side of the raft. I pulled myself around and up, all the while drinking what felt like gallons of Nile water. I’m hanging on to the side of the raft when I feel arms grab my life vest at the shoulders and heave.
I’m back in the boat with James and our new friends born of a harrowing shared experience. We finally get a chance to fall on our backs and breathe that sweet, sweet East African air. After a few moment’s break, we paddle to shore. It’s lunchtime. As we pull the rafts up out of the water, I’ve got that 50-yard-stare. I’m legitimately in a minor state of shock as I attempt to recover from the ordeal.
At the outset, James and I had chosen to take the tougher of the two routes through the river. There was a group that was a little more skittish than we were and chose to raft the other side of the river entirely, avoiding a brush with The Bad Place.
During lunch, I talked to James about maybe switching to the easy track for the second half of the day. I just… rafting the Nile in Uganda is cool and all, but I didn’t have any more of THAT in me. I couldn’t go through that experience again. Really, I just wanted to be done. No fiber of my being wanted to set foot in a raft again that day, but I knew that wasn’t really an option. James, on the other hand, really wanted to stick with the hard route, though as always, I appreciated his empathy as he told me we could do whatever I wanted to do.
It was at this point the storm really started to kick up and the clouds got even darker. Our lead guide said we needed to wrap up lunch earlier than normal if we were going to make it to the haul-out point where the bus would be waiting for us. It was decision time. We were about to be literally outrunning a thunderstorm on the Nile, and did I really want to do that the easy way? Is that the way I wanted this story to end?
Y’all know the answer to that.
So, I steeled myself, put my full faith and trust in our guides, and told James, “Fuck it. Let’s keep going. Let’s do the hard route.” We hopped back onto the river for what ended up being one of the coolest experiences I’ve had in my entire life.
Not only did we not flip for the rest of the rapids – and they weren’t easy – but I got to share a moment that I’ll remember forever with one of my very closest friends in the world. I mean for the love of all that’s holy we went whitewater rafting on THE NILE. We shot the FREAKING Nile – the longest, most famous, most consequential river on Earth. And not only that, we did it during a thunderstorm while lightning crackled overhead. The images, the sounds, the smells, the tastes. They’ll stick with me ’til I die. And James and I got to share it together. He got to rescue me from the river, and I got to return the favor. That’s the type of thing that creates a bond with a person that little else can shake.
In the end, we (intentionally) flipped the raft to swim the last few dozen meters. In the water, we swam together and squeezed the everloving shit out of each other, turning back to look in the direction we’d come, tears in our eyes, as we basked in the insanity and the majesty of it all.
As a boy, I remember listening to my Grandpa’s tales around the fireplace – how he lied about his age to join the Air Force at 17, at the height of World War II. Decades later, after he died, his brother shared a story that’s always stuck with me. When he was a young hotshot in the Air Force, he would sometimes partake in a little stunt flying. There was one time where he climbed up into the air and then dropped a roll of toilet paper from the cockpit. He then tried to see how many times he could cut the paper with his wings before being forced to pull up from the swiftly approaching ground. I mean. Come the fuck on. It helped that he had a little James Bond look about him, too, but THAT is a STORY. What a badass.
I started traveling when I realized that I… didn’t have any great stories to tell. I was just struggling to make it in New York, doing the same day to day grind as everyone else. Ultimately, I decided I didn’t want to grow up having regrets about things I wished I’d done and seen. So, at that point, I promised myself that I’d live a life worth telling my grandkids about.
Floating there in the murky water of the Victoria Nile, looking up to the thunderous sky, arm wrapped around my closest friend in the world, I threw my head back and howled. Finally, I was living a story worth telling. And you know what?
It was worth the risk.
HOW TO RAFT THE NILE IN UGANDA
Not completely scared off from the idea of rafting the Nile? Good. You shouldn’t be. You’ll have the experience of a lifetime – not to mention all the cool people you’ll get to meet. Keep an eye out for a post in the coming days covering everything you need to know in order to go rafting the Nile in Uganda.
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