Quote:
Adsman,
I get the impression that living this way, you have to sacrifice the chance for real money, education, and probably a chance at a family (or most guides choose not to). It sounds like you will always end up where you started, just older with a lot of great experiences. Agree/Disagree?
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.