West Sumatra 2009

Upper Batang Liki – Continuous Heaven (PART 2)

Tuesday, 26 January 2010 10:34 |

CONTINUED FROM PART 1

Not long after this the river started to become a lot larger. The jungle walls closed in and became more vertical and in places over a hundred metres high. Portaging didn’t look possible and I began to get nervous. We had been on the water a long time and the possibility of running out of light was becoming quite real. We didn’t scout any of the rapid and just plunged down, sometimes swopping over who would probe the next rapid. I remember one long rapid as it dropped down and into a right hand bend. Andrew made the eddy after a quick roll and I wondered how this one would turn out. He got out to video and down we went. As I dropped into a river wide hole I disappeared, taking two strokes to get out, luckily. Shew, glad we didn’t have more water! It’s a pity that we didn’t take many photos here, but we didn’t know how far we still had to go and the light was bad anyway. The idea of sleeping out here in the jungle unprepared didn’t appeal to any of us.

Upper Batang Liki – Continuous Heaven (PART 1)

Tuesday, 26 January 2010 09:36 |

The morning of Wednesday 18 November arrived very early and still raining. Breakfast consisted of noodles and fried eggs, which did the job. We idled around a bit longer as the rained eased and then it stopped. All 8 of us clambered into the vehicles to explore higher up on the river we had paddled the previous day and knock down another first descent. It was bound to be an exciting day.

Lower Batang Liki – The First of the First Descents, Part 2

Tuesday, 05 January 2010 20:57 |

[continued from part 1]

By 05:40 the television was close to maximum and I could obviously not sleep anymore – Tuesday 17 November had arrived on a loud note. Celliers said the mosques had started singing at 04:00 but luckily I didn’t hear it. Note I use the plural, there must have been around five of them, all of which you could hear at the same time. On one rainy morning it actually sounded great, but I guess I must have had more sleep that time round. Breakfast was boiled eggs and noodles, and I’ll spare you the meals from now on. Although they were often the same, and quite simple, they were absolutely marvelous and even as a fairly fussy eater, I found these meals disappearing quicker than a home sick mole. Soon after breakfast our two vehicles arrived. A Ford and Mitsubishi double cab, both of them 4x4. We loaded our boats and took a long drive to the put in of the, let’s call it, ‘Lower’ Batang Liki. Batang is the word for river. So it’s The Liki River and again, they have the words reversed so one could directly translate as River Liki but of course this is not the case.

Lower Batang Liki – The First of the First Descents, Part 1

Tuesday, 05 January 2010 20:56 |

In November of 2009, four South African kayakers teamed up with four Indonesian paddlers on an expedition to explore the rivers of the Solok Selatan regency of West Sumatra. After eleven days we had managed to paddle four beautiful rivers, and claim several first descents. In a series of articles I will uncover this oasis of paddling and tell our story from start to finish. (This On Friday the thirteenth, Andrew Kellet and I left Cape Town at 08:00. We flew up to Johannesburg and met up with Celliers Kruger and Hugh du Preez who also brought our brand spanking new boats with them. We had a close encounter with Emirates as they wanted to charge us R400 per kilogram (about 35 US Dollars) of excess luggage. With four creek boats, we were nicely over. Somehow, luck was on our side and by weighing Andrews boat only (which was an empty, small Solo), we convinced the check in counter man that all the boats weighed this little and were the same. Obviously this was a blatant lie as the other three Solo’s were all the large size and Celliers and Hugh also had a lot of gear inside their boats. Eventually we got everything on without paying a cent and away we went.