If you’ve been a regular reader of this site for a while, you may remember a trip to the Transkei with myself (Luke) and AT back in November 2008, when we paddled the lower Umzimvubu and then spent a week at The Falls backpackers near Maclear, waiting for rain which never came. Since that trip, I’ve been waiting to get back to the Transkei and paddle some of the classic rivers there. (Article by Luke Longridge)

 

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After an amazing season of consistent super-high flows on the Vaal (my home river), the water had been back down to usual low flows for a while, but further down the drainage, the Orange was still pumping at 1500 cumecs (40 000 cfs), and was looking like a good option for an Easter road trip. So, we piled 5 guys (myself, Philip Claassens, Lloyd Wallace, Hannes Pienaar, Adrian Vroom) and 2 girls (Jolene Fisher and my lovely wife Phia Longridge) into a Hannes’ dad’s Kombi and headed for Augrabies falls, one of the Northern Cape’s main tourist attractions, and one I’d never been to before.

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The annual Hansa Powerade Fish River Canoe marathon has been around for a long time now. I fact, since 1982, the year I was born. It’s a well respected race in which ‘canoeists’ pit themselves against the river in a two day race. Day one is 46km and day two is some 25% shorter they claim on the website. It’s a big event hosting usually in excess of 1500 paddlers, or ‘canoeists’ as they like to be called.

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“I promised myself that I would never paddle a river with crocodiles again. I now know that never is not a very long time.” These were the words of Paul Marais as we drove to the put-in of the rarely run Mutale River, in the remote northeast of South Africa.

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The fourth morning arrived with one of the most beautiful sunrises I’ve ever seen. For those few that were lucky enough to witness those five minutes of beauty it was well worth it. The photographs don’t even do it justice. The normal rigors of camp life rolled by in the way of boiling water for oats, drinking water, preparing more drinking water, packing up all the sleeping gear and stuffing everything back into the boats. It’s a good life.

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