Whanganui River Journey

As is often the case, our day's rest day was really too long. We did our laundry, replenished our supplies in a supermarket in the nearest town (about an hour's drive away) and packed all we would need for the next three days into waterproof barrels. The cooking pans went in first!

It took about an hour to reach the river along an unsealed road We travelled with the canoes and gear in a small Toyota truck. The ruggedness of Toyota utility vehicles is almost legendary over here. It is hard to imagine many vehicles being able to withstand the sort of hammering that this one got for very long so their reputation may be justified. Every Kiwi seems to remember the episode of Top Gear in which Clarkson & Co attempted to destroy a Toyota pick-up, even if they never saw it.

The pre-job brief for the canoeing was certainly brief. I can only remember three specific pieces of information: follow the river downstream, look for the 'vee' of smooth water when approaching rapids and, if you get trapped against an obstacle in the rapids, lean towards it rather than away from it. We hoped that we wouldn't need to test the last one. The supplementary written advice that we were given on River Safety helpfully suggested that we learned a few basic paddling strokes – very quickly presumably.

Setting off in the canoe

The Whanganui, or the bit that we did anyway, is a Wye-sized river that runs in a deep gorge. The walls of the gorge are almost shear, about 50m high and covered in dense jungle (the Kiwis euphemistically call this 'bush'). There is almost no road access and no paths; One you have started, that's it. It was 80 km and 3 days to our pick-up point. Fortunately we are old hands with Canadian canoes and we were soon putting all those three hours of past experience to good effect. In reality it wasn't too difficult, though there was some heated discussion after the first rapids concerning the basic paddle strokes that the other person had used.

In between the rapids, there were long stretches of just paddling. The river is and its valley are almost untouched by the hand of man. There are no settlements, buildings, power lines, landing stages or power boats. The downside of this is that each stretch of the river looks just like the preceding one. We alternated between paddling with just sufficient effort to maintain steerage, and paddling hard in the hope of reaching somewhere that looked a bit different.

The campsites are good but very basic. Buried in the bush, they seemed to be home to every type of biting insect. This included the 'long-drop' toilets, where a fresh swarm would appear as you lifted the seat cover. Drinking water is something that is provided at each site, usually rainwater. At one site a printed but faded notice said that the water was good to drink. Maggie noticed that her mug of water contained a few small wriggling worms so the warden promptly changed the notice for an equally-faded one, advising that the water should be boiled. In reality these were just mosquito larvae and relatively harmless; the invisible giardia is the real worry.

Bush rats were another problem at the same site. One of these chewed right through the tent of one of our fellow canoeists during the night to get at her peanut-butter sandwiches. These were right by her head; she didn't sleep again that night.

On our final day we were starting to get pretty bored with the constant paddling. The occasional jet-boat would come past. These were quite capable of swamping a canoe and the waves took ages to die down as they reflected back and forth from the walls of the gorge but they did provide some variety Fortunately the rapids were becoming more challenging although no more frequent. Right towards the end we came to the fiercest yet and were quite relieved to get through with only 6 inches of water in the boat. The following canoe capsized and the one behind that filled with water and foundered. Thinking back, I do remember that the brief said that we should expect to get wet before the end of the trip!