Yeah, this can most certainly happen. Life is a trade-off. You can't have everything. A lot of my old friends from Perth got the whole marriage/morgate/kids thing happening. I don't have that. I'm not that worried though. You can always catch up to get that stuff, they can't catch up to get what I've done.

Mark and Uncle Mick have come over to my place for some snowboarding, so I haven't had much time to post. Apologies.


We had a bit of a problem with the money. At that stage the currency in Italy was still the lira. A beer cost 2500 lira. The weekly shopping bill came to something like 93,456 lira. It was a pain in the butt to say it in Italian, we were buggered if we wanted to say it in English. Maz came up with our own currency name. He started to call lira, pingers. So a beer wasn’t 2500 lira, it was two and a half pingers. That shopping bill would be 93 pingers. It worked well. So well that we still use it today.

Jeno turned up and I filled him in on the situation. He wasn’t particularly impressed at our sleeping arrangements, or Ralph, who was turning out to be a real nightmare. Rafting isn’t just about steering a boat and looking after your punters. It’s about looking after each other as well. When you go rafting, you want to be backed up by good guides. If you get into serious trouble, you want to know that you’ve got real experts watching your back. So a rookie guide is a liability on the river. He won’t be able to help you, but you have to constantly help him. That’s fine, because we’ve all been there. But this situation was different. We had a rookie guide that was continuing to pretend that he was an expert. Which meant that he wasn’t listening to us. He was so freaked out about getting busted that his way of dealing with that was to puff himself up with self importance. If I was behind him for a 25km trip, he wouldn’t look at me once. So if I flipped, or wrapped, or had a big problem, he wouldn’t know. He’d just keep heading down the river. And when things go wrong on the river, they happen fast. If I said something to him after the trip he would get angry with me for daring to presume that I knew more than him.

One day we’d all had enough, and Jeno, Maz, Zane and I went down to talk to the owner. Charlia was somewhat surprised. He said that the guys resume was top notch. I asked to see the resume. He had listed The Coruh in Turkey as one of his rivers. Zane stepped up and pointed out that Ralph had been there, but only in the capacity as a safety kayaker, and only for a short period of time. The resume painted a different story. We ran quick checks on his other places of work, and the same story continued to emerge – he wasn’t a riverguide, only a safety kayaker, which is like someone who’s only ever driven scooters wanting to drive a semi-trailer across the USA.

Charlia was a bit of a tool though. He told us that we had to deliver Ralph the news of his demise. As usual it got left up to me. There was a very nasty scene at the rafting base, but the other guides all stood around and backed me up. Charlia was hiding in his office. Ralph and his wife packed their bags and were gone the next day.

We were all struggling with our Italian. 99% of the punters were Italian, and we had to be able to deliver a ten minute safety talk. But there were other, more disturbing problems. Charlia’s operational system involved the guides having to wear waterproof two way radios. I would be heading into a big rapid and suddenly the two way would come alive; “Where are you? What are you doing?” Well, I’m on the ******g river and I’m ******g rafting, what do you think I’m doing? But he insisted on doing this in Italian, saying that we had to be able to speak Italian. Right, we’ve been here for two weeks and you expect us to be able to communicate in Italian on a two way. Tosser.

Every day he’d change the operating procedures. One day we’d have to dress the punters first, the next day we’d be dressing the punters and he’d come out screaming at us saying that we had to load the boats first. Every day like this. A big storm came through and it rained for three days. The river flooded and we weren’t able to raft. But Charlia had punters booked – we had to raft. His bright idea was to go and raft another river, one that had never been rafted before. It got less run-off and was usually dry, but the rain had upped it to a reasonable level. We loaded the punters in and set off. It was an hours drive to another valley. We arrived at the put-in and Charlia gave me a bicycle and told me to ride down the river and count all the dams. I just looked at him in shock. Dams?

Sure enough the river was full of artificial weirs. These are the most dangerous objects on a river, as the water drops over at a sheer 90 degrees on a uniform ledge, which means that it creates holes that are almost inescapable. Very, very dangerous. I rode for about five km and I counted almost twenty weirs. They were all run-able, but you wouldn’t want to make a mistake. I cycled back and told the others the good news. Nick was an excellent kayaker – he’d represented New Zealand at the world rodeo championships, and it was his job to scout ahead and signal the lines to take and danger spots to avoid. After the trip he freely admitted that he’d never been more terrified in his entire life. We had three rafts, myself, Josh and Zane. But the really killer point was the two-way. Charlia set them up and then proceeded to follow us on a bicycle, whilst screaming instructions into the two way.

A few minutes after setting off, it became clearly apparent that we were in trouble. The river was so heavily dammed that its normal flow was extremely low. Which meant that any heavy debris that fell into the river that would normally be washed away had not been. Added to this was the fact that the rocks were a slate-grey color, which was the exact same color of the water. I barreled down the first rapid and suddenly without warning I slammed into a large submerged rock. I hadn’t been able to see it. The river hadn’t had a chance to carve a path through the debris built up over hundreds of years. This place was a death trap.

We ran the five kilometer weir section, passed through a pool and entered the ‘natural’ section. I preferred the weirs. The river was a complete mess. Nothing made sense. The lines weren’t clear. Rocks were sticking up in the middle of rapids where rocks just shouldn’t have been. They were unavoidable. At one point we stopped to scout a section. We were making painfully slow progress. Josh and I scrambled over the slippery, knife-edged rocks to try and find a good line through the rapid. Charlia was standing on the other side of the river watching us. The two-way came to life as he began screaming at me. I looked over at him and calmly switched the radio off. Josh did the same. He began jumping up and down on the far bank in fury. We ignored him. Suddenly Josh gave a yelp and leapt into the air. He’d trodden on a viper and had [censored] himself with fright. He kept repeating that he’d trodden on a snake.

“That’s great,” I said.

“But it was a snake!”

“Did it bite you?” I asked.

“No…”

“Then can we get on with finishing this horrible trip?” I asked calmly.

We managed to get the boats through the section. The river flattened out and it began to rain again. Nick was ahead in his kayak. I was the first raft. Suddenly Nick began back-paddling in a frenzied manner and darted off to the side of the river. I signaled the two rafts behind me to eddy out as I called a back-paddle from my crew. My raft was in the center of the river. Nick jumped out of his boat and rushed forward. Whatever he saw made his shoulders slump. There was a huge weir that we didn’t know was there. My boat was already too close. There was no way I’d be able to avoid it. Using river signals I was able to determine from Nick that it was a sheer drop, over ten meters high, with a large recirculation at the bottom – a death-trap. I couldn’t believe it. I was going to die on this stupid piss-ant river, in this stupid valley, working for this stupid company. I was more angry than scared. What a pisser.

Nick suddenly signaled that there was a 45 degree ramp, just left of center in the weir. If he could direct me to that we’d have a shot of punching through. I had no visual markers so I was dependent on Nick getting me to the exact point. My crew had been back-paddling for over five minutes now, they were stuffed. I called for a final effort and managed to slot the raft directly onto the ramp. We shot down through a curtain of water and busted through the stopper at the bottom. I owed Nick a beer.

The other rafts pulled out and dragged their boats around. It was far too dangerous to attempt again. My crew were delirious with happiness and relief. We arrived at a large town. The river ran between two twenty foot high stone walls. Charlia signaled that we had to exit the river at this point. We somehow managed to stop, and we dragged the rafts up the sheer drop. It was close to six in the evening. We had set out at ten in the morning. This trip would have taken us a couple of hours back in Val di Sole, but he didn’t give us a cent extra. We packed up and then went to a local bar where we told the other guides of the days events. They found it hard to believe. We found it hard to believe. Josh kept carrying on about the snake. Nick was sporting a thousand yard stare. Charlia was nowhere to be seen. It was shaping up to be an interesting season.

Cairns is backpacker heaven. If you can’t get laid in Cairns just give up.

And I'm wondering how backpacking and getting laid are related....

adsman's trip report = most awesome trip report evar. Keep writing.

Story is still great! What type of boats were you guiding? Was it something like this?

Seems like you get out of a lot of really hairy situations by sheer luck. Do you feel lucky when that stuff happens?

How pissed off were your punters about that trip?

Jimmyjohn; obviously you've never lived in a backpacker town.

Crazycanuk; Weird, that's the exact same boat that we used that first season in Italy. Even the same colour.

Jablue; I don't think that luck comes into it. You just gotta do what you gotta do. I really think that, I'm not trying to be silly or anything. Put your head down and get the job done. You can worry after you're back at the bar.

Kid; punters are always pissed off at something. It just washes over me.

does this apply to things like happening to meet a fellow guide in the airport in a country where you do not know the language? Sure you would probably eventually get to your destination, but don't you think you were "lucky" to have come across that particular guy at that particular time?

I suppose if you put yourself in situations like this enough, you're bound to get "lucky" some of the time, but I would definitely feel lucky if that happened for me.

Yeah, that was lucky. But I still think that a lot of the time you make your own luck by not getting disheartened when things don't go the way you want them.

There were four rafting companies in the valley. We were one of the smaller ones. The season progressed with its usual range of problems. The main bar in the valley was called the Red Rock. The beer on tap was XXXX, which is an Aussie beer. We thought that was a little weird. There was a giant illuminated XXXX sign on top of the bar which was clearly visible. One of the X’s was burnt out. We called the bar the triple X car-park. Most of our time was spent there. The music was terrible, the beer tasted like crap, and we had no luck with the local girls. We couldn’t talk to them. I’d go up to a girl in the bar, introduce myself, ask her name, ask how she was, and then we’d both stand there like stunned mullets with strained smiles on our faces. Jeno had a bit of luck, but that’s because he had never relied on his gift of the gab. I needed my gift of the gab. It was a big inducement to keep trying to learn Italian.

The work was good though. We were doing around three trips a day, and the pingers were piling up. August is the crazy period. Heaps of work, we averaged five trips a day. At the beginning of August Charlia just left. Apparently he needed to oversee another company he was setting up on another river somewhere. We were left to fend for ourselves. Carla the secretary and I managed to run the show for the insane period. She ran the office, I ran the river. We pulled it off well. No major problems for the whole month. We were all quite pleased with ourselves. At the end of the month, Charlia suddenly reappeared. There was no thanks for the work we’d done, he just came in and started pulling things apart, accusations flying thick and fast. We were all seriously jacked off at this.

There was another smaller company in the valley run by a couple of Argentineans. They approached me with an offer. They needed a guide to see out the rest of the season, which finished close to the end of September. They offered me some good money. The start date was for the 5th of September. I said sure. I worked up until that date and the day before I was going to leave I walked into the office and told Charlia to pay me out. He refused, saying that I had to stay with him until the end of the season. At this point we hadn’t exchanged a civil word for about a week. His English wasn’t very good, but I managed to convince him to pay me. It might have had something to do with the fact that I threatened to throw his computers in the river, drive his vehicles into the river, and burn down the hut containing all the equipment. It took me about ten minutes. I got paid and walked out. Afterwards Carla came into the office and found Charlia looking shell-shocked. She asked him what had happened and he replied that another guide had threatened to kill him. Seems that this was a frequent occurrence.

I worked for the little company for the rest of the month. They were quite strange, but they left me alone, paid me on time, and gave me a luxurious apartment to stay in. I was quite happy. But the season was winding down, the days were getting colder. Snow began to appear on the mountain peaks and the river was getting lower and lower. Finally one morning I told them that I was off, there was no more work. They agreed, paid me out and I packed my bags and took the train to Verona. I had money in my pocket, but no job and no place to stay. I had become friends with a guide who worked for another company called Nonno. Nonno means grandfather in Italian, and he was called that due to the fact that he was so slow to make up his mind, even for an Italian. He took me in and I began the hunt for a new apartment. But the combination of not speaking the language, not having a job and not really having a reason to stay there was defeating me. I couldn’t find a place to live. All I knew was that I didn’t want to go back to Australia. I felt that that would be a step backwards.

Finally with some desperation I contacted the Spanish girl that I’d been seeing in Uganda. She was back in Madrid, but it seemed that things were not cool for me to go and stay with her. One morning I woke up and realized that I had to get home while I still had money to get home. I booked a flight online from London. I hopped a flight the next day to London. On leaving Italy I had some trouble at customs. Apparently I had overstayed my visa. I pleaded ignorance, pretended not to speak a word of Italian and finally they just let me go. So even if I’d managed to stay I would have been illegally in the country. It hadn’t even registered with me to check if I could have stayed or not. I was a little bit distanced from reality. I got to London and raced through the city to get my ticket in time. The plane left that night. I arrived back in Perth with a few hundred dollars in my pocket. I was home, seven years after I’d left. I had a new baby sister that was doing well after her operation, all my friends were glad to see me, and I hadn’t a clue what to do with myself.

"and I hadn’t a clue what to do with myself"

This is what makes your story so thrilling and enjoyable to follow.The reader does not know what happens next.Just as you did not at the time.

Where most people want answers in their life,you want questions.When you live your life with questions,your life becomes the answer.

This is going to be my last write-up in this thread. I feel that it’s distracting me a bit from what I should be doing, ie working on my book. I also feel that I can’t really better the stuff that I wrote about Africa and I don’t want t o post here feeling that I have to. I just want to thank all of you guys for the support, it’s been a lot of fun writing this up and getting peoples feedback. I thought that I had an ordinary sort of life. Now it appears not.

I just want to add something for the original target audience of this thread – the younger posters who are wondering what to do with their lives and how to go about changing it. When I left Perth all of those years ago my only plan was to get to Sydney. I didn’t know that I’d end up being a rafting guide, and I sure as hell didn’t plan on going to the places that I’ve been to. It’s just one step at a time, but most importantly, keep an eye open for possible options and have the courage to give it a go. That’s all you need. Think about why you can do something, not why you can’t. The luck factor has been brought up in the thread. I don’t believe in it. I think ‘lucky’ people are those who don’t get discouraged by their setbacks. I failed my shotgun guiding test three times in Cairns, but giving up just wasn’t an option. Just plug away.

Writing this thread has put me in contact with a great editor, and we’re now working together. Thanks go to Joe Tall for that. Lots of wine for you if you ever get out to Italy. Thanks to El D for allowing this to take the course that it has, he popped in with the occasional encouragement which was a huge help.

So, what happened next? It’s a long story and all I’ll say is that I alternated between summer in Perth and summer in Italy for a few years until I was able to stay in Italy full time. I’ve been here for five years now. I run the largest rafting base in the valley and this June, hopefully, I’ll be opening a very cool lounge bar here with Uncle Mick, who now lives and works in London. I don’t travel anymore, as the life of living out of a bag no longer appeals to me. I like coming home, opening the door and finding all my stuff. I’m 35, single, and content with my lot. If one person who read this thread gets inspired to go out and change their life then I’ll be very happy. So if you do, please let me know.

Thanks again,

ads.

adsman,

This is my first reply in the thread but I've been reading it avidly since it began. Thanks for one of the all-time great threads on 2+2.

Good luck with the book, I'm sure it will be well received.

ads: I look forward to visiting your lounge in Italy. If not this summer, next. Thanks for your contributions here, this was an incredible thread, definitely the highlight of this forum so far.

All: Now that the main part of this thread is finished, my comment about not posting short awesome thread/thanks/whatever posts no longer applies. Go crazy.

I've been checking this every day since the first post. Thanks.

ni han ni han. perhaps i can get my boss to sponsor a trip to familiarize me with italian wines of the rafting region
jason

@adsman
let me know when your book is finished. i want to read the rest of the story.



thanks again for sharing some of your experiences in life through this truly fantastic and inspiring thread.

adsman - I've really looked forward to reading your posts for last couple weeks and you've never disappointed. There are some real jewels in your writing that really stuck out to me. I can't wait to see what comes of the book. Thank you for sharing your story with us.

This is the best thread I've ever read on 2p2. I just turned 24 and I still have a lot to learn about life, but how in the world did you ever think this...

Your life is far from the norm IMO (not trying to be offensive at all). I only wish I will have the balls to some day do something like this, even if its for a shorter period of time. Thanks for taking the time to write about all of your travels.

Please be sure to let the 2+2 community know when your book is available.

Thanks for a great thread, Adsman.

...and I thought moving to NYC w/o knowing a soul was a big deal. Wow!

And let me know where your lounge is. I expect to have another vaca to Italy this year or next.

adsman - I really enjoyed reading your story.

Thanks Adsman, great story and I look forward to reading your book!