When I was the same age as Peter or Sam are now, my dad made us watch the movie The Bridge on the River Kwai. Growing up, we would spend every other weekend with my dad. He would pull up in front of our house on Snug Harbor Dr. every other Friday afternoon in his Porsche 911 and honk the horn. Our backpacks already packed for the weekend, we jumped like Pavlovian dogs. I stretched out in the expansive leather bucket seat in front, while my brothers squeezed under the sloped glass dome over what barely passed as a back seat. Those weekends almost always began with a stop at the video store. These were pre-Blockbuster video store days in the mid-80s. Our video store -- like others from the same era -- had a certain dimly-lit section in the back behind a curtain. We would pick out movies to watch over the weekend. My dad usually chose. The Great Escape, Marathon Man, Papillon, and The French Connection. I was raised on a healthy diet of Steve McQueen and Gene Hackman. My dad was the furthest from an auteur but he knew a good movie when he saw one.
I remembered loving the movie. Without really thinking about where the movie was filmed. The Bridge on the River Kwai is a 1957 war film directed by David Lean, based on the novel Le Pont de la Rivière Kwaï (1952) by Pierre Boulle, and tells the story of the construction of the Burma Railway during the Japanese occupation of World War II. When we were recently presented with an opportunity to go white water river rafting at the same spot where the movie was filmed there was no way I could say no.
We had a very early wake-up call to meet the bus that would drive us to the interior of Sri Lanka. The rapids are located near the town of Kitugala on the Kelani Ganga River, the second-longest river in Sri Lanka which begins at Adam's Peak, the island's tallest mountain and runs all the way down to Colombo. The drive was long, a little over three hours, on narrow roads winding their way into the jungle, but went by quickly. Your eyes never get tired, because there is so much to see. The city literally dissolved around us, gobbled up by the jungle. We passed rubber and tea plantations. Peter and Sam asked why the rubber trees wore dresses, skirts of transparent plastic to collect the black, sticky sap. Tiers of tea plants scalloped into mountainsides rose on both sides of the winding road, then disappeared into the upper canopy, clouds, mist, or fog.
Immediately upon arriving at the hotel, we had a quick breakfast and changed, then were taken three miles upriver.
Much deliberation was taken in determining which children were old enough or big enough to participate the rafting (which would become very ironic later on in the morning when no deliberation at all was taken in evaluating the fitness of the children for a potentially far more dangerous activity). It was decided four of the smaller children -- including Clementine -- would skip the first two rapids and meet the boat downstream. Elise decided to stick with the kids and meet us down river, as well, which ended up being a prescient decision, because the four were too small to ride the two rapids, but evidently big enough to ride in the back of an open pick-up truck down a bouncy, unpaved jungle road without adult supervision just fine.
Because Elise stayed with the small kids, Sam became our sixth paddler. Peter, Sam, and I shared a raft with two high-school age girls and a guy I'd never met before with red-rimmed beady eyes. (This was definitely the type of situation in which you size up your boat mates carefully, and -- to be honest -- the guy who looked hungover...or maybe, still drunk...wouldn't have been my first choice.) Nevertheless, I took the front left side of the boat and he took the front right side of the boat with Peter planted on a slowly-deflating pontoon in between us.
We first learned the various commands we would have to execute, plus the proper way to hold the paddle so we didn't accidentally bludgeon one of our raft mates. There was 'paddle forward' (relatively self-explanatory), 'paddle backwards' (same, though we never had to paddle backwards. Which is good, because I think it would have been really hard to paddle back up the rapids), 'rest' (this was my favorite command), and 'get down!' (aka "Holy Shit! We're about to go over the foaming white water of doom and we're all going to dieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!"). We practiced all the commands, too, before tackling the first set of rapids and I remained convinced 'paddle backwards' was really just an excuse for those of us in the front of the boat to 'accidentally' splash those behind us in the raft. 'Get down' would become particularly useful when a tree branch dropped down over the river and we all had to get our heads flush with the side of the inflatable raft in order to avoid being decapitated.
We would approach the first rapid early in our downriver voyage. The rubber nose of the boat tipped forward revealing a torrent of white angry froth. Peter played the role of coxswain or captain well, but it was our Sri Lankan river guide who instilled in us a true sense of urgency with his repeated calls to 'paddle forward'. We were going forward whether we liked it or not. It made me wonder what fate may befall us were we not to paddle forward. I didn't want to find out. I reached deep into the water, the color of coffee with a touch too much milk in it. Then 'get down!'. Peter squealed as me and Beady-eyes squeezed in next to him at the bottom of the raft; the river came up at us, spilling into the raft. I only had a second to look back to make sure Sam -- who was sitting on the side of the raft, paddling -- was still there.
He was. We emerged soaked and laughing and triumphantly. One of the high school girls asked, "Didn't they tell us we could wear our normal clothes? That we wouldn't get wet?" We all laughed, because it was impossible to imagine how one could possibly not get wet.
We went one other big rapid before coming to the bridge location. Unfortunately, all that was left was a few blocks of concrete marking the foundation.
Shortly past the bridge location, we padded to shore just as Elise, Clementine, and the three other small rafters came stumbling out of the jungle. As our boat was already full, Elise and Clementine climbed in one of the other rafts. There were two or three smaller rapids left to go, but they were definitely still big enough so everyone can say they had a chance to experience white water.
After the last rapid, we had the opportunity to jump out of the raft and float down river with our life jackets. You didn't have to ask Peter or Sam twice, but even though I offered to hold on to Clementine, she preferred the safe confines of the raft.
Once we reached the hotel, we stumbled up to shore, bodies drained of endorphins. We dutifully handed our paddles over and were summarily escorted back to the same pick-up trucks Elise and Clementine had ridden in to meet us after the first two rapids. We all piled in the back, helmets and life jackets still on, and taken up the road, my bottom a little too bony for the wooden bench in the pick-up's bed.
We had been taken slightly back up river, to a wide spot above the torrent where a bridge spanned the frothing current below. We tumbled out of the back of the truck before following the guide across the bridge. To our left were the rapids we had just tackled. To our right, was a wooden pedestrian bridge that spanned a wide part of the river. Each end of the bridge disappeared into dense palms. The bridge sagged precipitously in the middle; a lone woman crossed it, holding a large basket on her head, presumably going to or coming from home to town or back again.
We passed a factory; a pack of dogs wandered by us, oblivious to our presence. They sat in the dusty grey dirt and scratched behind their ears with hind paws. A small camp sat behind the factory where workers hung lines to dry laundry, a seemingly futile pursuit in a land as humid and wet as the mountains of Sri Lanka, and watched us from behind corrugated metal shades, dhotis around their waists. As we passed the factory, the jungle swallowed the path. We first walked through tall reeds before the path narrowed further, criss-crossed by gnarled roots. The grey soot around the factory gave way to rich red earth. Ferns and vines reached out to us as though expecting hand-outs or loose change. The path sloped upward sharply, steps formed from the earth packed between roots.
Elise and Sam walked ahead of us. I lost them for a few moments as the path wound through the dense jungle.
I came up to them around a turn. Sam was panicked, looking down at his feet.
"Get it off! Get it off!" he cried, his voice rising an octave in distress.
"What is it?"
I stooped and looked down at his feet. A leech squiggled in between his toes.
"Get it off!"
"How do you get a leech off?" I heard Elise ask in my ear. I reached down and tried to pull it off, but couldn't get a hold. The leech was small and slimy; it slipped out from between my fingers.
When I did get a good grip, I pulled but it held fast. I, too, panicked momentarily, remembering the scene in Stand By Me where Wil Wheaton finds a leech attached to his... ehem...groin area...and passes out. I couldn't remember how to get a leech off. Salt? I remember another movie where I think they burned it off. Did anyone have a lighter?
I tugged again....and it came off. I wiped it from the tips of my fingers on the bark of a tree nearby.
And then everyone freaked out.
Before we reached the our destination, a waterfall deep in the island jungle, I'd have to pull three more leeches off of Sam, two or three off of Peter, and several from my own feet. We all had on Tevas, open-toed sandals with straps over the toes, the top of the foot, and another behind the heel. The leeches would get stuck under the strap, between the sandal and the skin of the foot. The leeches were in the trees and the longer we stayed on the path, the more leeches we would get, and the more leeches we would get the slower we went and the longer we stayed on the path.
We emerged from the jungle on to a cropping of rocks overlooking a waterfall. The kids were crying or nearly so. They wanted to go back.
"Has anyone ever done canyoning?" The guide called.
I looked down river. A series of waterfalls, rapids, and rocks trailed off in the distance, descending rapidly down the mountain we had just hiked up.
"I want to go home!" Peter cried.
We have two ways back, I told them. We can go back down the trail ("With the leeches?!") or jump over the waterfall.
Needless to say, neither of these two options particularly appealed to either of the kids. Or, likely, Elise at this point, for that matter. But here we were. So, we all pulled up our proverbial bootstraps and decided the fastest way to get back was to go over the waterfall.
I somehow convinced them the water moved too quickly for them to get any more leeches. I don't actually know if this was true or not, but I believed it at the time.
Canyoning -- just as the name suggests -- is an outdoor activity and mode of travelling in canyons involving scrambling over, climbing up, and scrapping knees and elbows on rocks, jumping over waterfalls, abseiling down cliffs slick with moss, and swimming. There would be four or five jumps or slides, natural slides carved out of the rock by the movement of the water over several centuries or millennia.
The first obstacle was a jump into a natural well of sorts, scooped out of the side of the canyon by repetitive swirling waters. Everyone passed and decided to scoot on their tizus down the rock to the next obstacle.
We proceeded like this, mostly on our bottoms or all fours on the rock, down the canyon, occasionally, jumping off cliffs or sliding down rock slides. Everyone grew braver the more obstacles we successfully completed. Clementine and I went down the rock slides together. I held her in my lap and we slid down the rock, flying off the end, falling several feet, before landing in the water below. Every time, she would wait to go last, steeling herself for the challenge ahead. I never had to force her to go. By the time it was our turn, she would take a deep breath and say to me (without taking her eyes from the water), "Okay...I'm ready."
Right before the last jump, the canyon merged with the trail we had hiked up. Elise and Clementine decided they had enough and were going to take their chances on the path. Elise put Clementine on her back and hiked back down the mountain, carrying her the entire way back to the factory where the pick-up trucks waited for us. The boys and I decided we'd stick to the river which may have been a mistake.
The last jump was high. The cliff was easily several meters high. After we jumped, I tried to swim towards the boys, but was pulled away from them by a current. I tried to scramble up a rock where I could gain purchase and hold on to them, but as I did, Peter thought squiggly contours on the rock were leeches (who was I -- at that point -- to say they weren't?) and panicked. Through their tears, Peter and Sam pulled me off the rock, clutching at me in fear. A colleague who canyoned with us helped me find a path through the rocks with the boys. I was able to stand and I grabbed both Peter and Sam by the life vest. "Look at me," I told them firmly. They did hesitantly. "We're going to be okay, okay?" "Okay," they replied unconvinced. "I won't let anything happen to you."
We pulled ourselves from the rocks and ran down the path past the leeches. We saw Elise and Clementine sitting in the back of the pick-up. I found myself bleeding from a cut on my knee suffered on the last jump. We were all bruised and battered. My shoulders ached from carrying Pete down the mountain through the leech-infested jungle. We bumped back to the riverside hotel just in time for lunch.
The trip was thrilling, amazing, stressful, and physically and emotionally exhausting. In short, epic. Just like the movie.
We had a very early wake-up call to meet the bus that would drive us to the interior of Sri Lanka. The rapids are located near the town of Kitugala on the Kelani Ganga River, the second-longest river in Sri Lanka which begins at Adam's Peak, the island's tallest mountain and runs all the way down to Colombo. The drive was long, a little over three hours, on narrow roads winding their way into the jungle, but went by quickly. Your eyes never get tired, because there is so much to see. The city literally dissolved around us, gobbled up by the jungle. We passed rubber and tea plantations. Peter and Sam asked why the rubber trees wore dresses, skirts of transparent plastic to collect the black, sticky sap. Tiers of tea plants scalloped into mountainsides rose on both sides of the winding road, then disappeared into the upper canopy, clouds, mist, or fog.
Immediately upon arriving at the hotel, we had a quick breakfast and changed, then were taken three miles upriver.
Much deliberation was taken in determining which children were old enough or big enough to participate the rafting (which would become very ironic later on in the morning when no deliberation at all was taken in evaluating the fitness of the children for a potentially far more dangerous activity). It was decided four of the smaller children -- including Clementine -- would skip the first two rapids and meet the boat downstream. Elise decided to stick with the kids and meet us down river, as well, which ended up being a prescient decision, because the four were too small to ride the two rapids, but evidently big enough to ride in the back of an open pick-up truck down a bouncy, unpaved jungle road without adult supervision just fine.
Because Elise stayed with the small kids, Sam became our sixth paddler. Peter, Sam, and I shared a raft with two high-school age girls and a guy I'd never met before with red-rimmed beady eyes. (This was definitely the type of situation in which you size up your boat mates carefully, and -- to be honest -- the guy who looked hungover...or maybe, still drunk...wouldn't have been my first choice.) Nevertheless, I took the front left side of the boat and he took the front right side of the boat with Peter planted on a slowly-deflating pontoon in between us.
We first learned the various commands we would have to execute, plus the proper way to hold the paddle so we didn't accidentally bludgeon one of our raft mates. There was 'paddle forward' (relatively self-explanatory), 'paddle backwards' (same, though we never had to paddle backwards. Which is good, because I think it would have been really hard to paddle back up the rapids), 'rest' (this was my favorite command), and 'get down!' (aka "Holy Shit! We're about to go over the foaming white water of doom and we're all going to dieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!"). We practiced all the commands, too, before tackling the first set of rapids and I remained convinced 'paddle backwards' was really just an excuse for those of us in the front of the boat to 'accidentally' splash those behind us in the raft. 'Get down' would become particularly useful when a tree branch dropped down over the river and we all had to get our heads flush with the side of the inflatable raft in order to avoid being decapitated.
We would approach the first rapid early in our downriver voyage. The rubber nose of the boat tipped forward revealing a torrent of white angry froth. Peter played the role of coxswain or captain well, but it was our Sri Lankan river guide who instilled in us a true sense of urgency with his repeated calls to 'paddle forward'. We were going forward whether we liked it or not. It made me wonder what fate may befall us were we not to paddle forward. I didn't want to find out. I reached deep into the water, the color of coffee with a touch too much milk in it. Then 'get down!'. Peter squealed as me and Beady-eyes squeezed in next to him at the bottom of the raft; the river came up at us, spilling into the raft. I only had a second to look back to make sure Sam -- who was sitting on the side of the raft, paddling -- was still there.
He was. We emerged soaked and laughing and triumphantly. One of the high school girls asked, "Didn't they tell us we could wear our normal clothes? That we wouldn't get wet?" We all laughed, because it was impossible to imagine how one could possibly not get wet.
We went one other big rapid before coming to the bridge location. Unfortunately, all that was left was a few blocks of concrete marking the foundation.
Shortly past the bridge location, we padded to shore just as Elise, Clementine, and the three other small rafters came stumbling out of the jungle. As our boat was already full, Elise and Clementine climbed in one of the other rafts. There were two or three smaller rapids left to go, but they were definitely still big enough so everyone can say they had a chance to experience white water.
After the last rapid, we had the opportunity to jump out of the raft and float down river with our life jackets. You didn't have to ask Peter or Sam twice, but even though I offered to hold on to Clementine, she preferred the safe confines of the raft.
Once we reached the hotel, we stumbled up to shore, bodies drained of endorphins. We dutifully handed our paddles over and were summarily escorted back to the same pick-up trucks Elise and Clementine had ridden in to meet us after the first two rapids. We all piled in the back, helmets and life jackets still on, and taken up the road, my bottom a little too bony for the wooden bench in the pick-up's bed.
We had been taken slightly back up river, to a wide spot above the torrent where a bridge spanned the frothing current below. We tumbled out of the back of the truck before following the guide across the bridge. To our left were the rapids we had just tackled. To our right, was a wooden pedestrian bridge that spanned a wide part of the river. Each end of the bridge disappeared into dense palms. The bridge sagged precipitously in the middle; a lone woman crossed it, holding a large basket on her head, presumably going to or coming from home to town or back again.
We passed a factory; a pack of dogs wandered by us, oblivious to our presence. They sat in the dusty grey dirt and scratched behind their ears with hind paws. A small camp sat behind the factory where workers hung lines to dry laundry, a seemingly futile pursuit in a land as humid and wet as the mountains of Sri Lanka, and watched us from behind corrugated metal shades, dhotis around their waists. As we passed the factory, the jungle swallowed the path. We first walked through tall reeds before the path narrowed further, criss-crossed by gnarled roots. The grey soot around the factory gave way to rich red earth. Ferns and vines reached out to us as though expecting hand-outs or loose change. The path sloped upward sharply, steps formed from the earth packed between roots.
Elise and Sam walked ahead of us. I lost them for a few moments as the path wound through the dense jungle.
I came up to them around a turn. Sam was panicked, looking down at his feet.
"Get it off! Get it off!" he cried, his voice rising an octave in distress.
"What is it?"
I stooped and looked down at his feet. A leech squiggled in between his toes.
"Get it off!"
"How do you get a leech off?" I heard Elise ask in my ear. I reached down and tried to pull it off, but couldn't get a hold. The leech was small and slimy; it slipped out from between my fingers.
When I did get a good grip, I pulled but it held fast. I, too, panicked momentarily, remembering the scene in Stand By Me where Wil Wheaton finds a leech attached to his... ehem...groin area...and passes out. I couldn't remember how to get a leech off. Salt? I remember another movie where I think they burned it off. Did anyone have a lighter?
I tugged again....and it came off. I wiped it from the tips of my fingers on the bark of a tree nearby.
And then everyone freaked out.
Before we reached the our destination, a waterfall deep in the island jungle, I'd have to pull three more leeches off of Sam, two or three off of Peter, and several from my own feet. We all had on Tevas, open-toed sandals with straps over the toes, the top of the foot, and another behind the heel. The leeches would get stuck under the strap, between the sandal and the skin of the foot. The leeches were in the trees and the longer we stayed on the path, the more leeches we would get, and the more leeches we would get the slower we went and the longer we stayed on the path.
We emerged from the jungle on to a cropping of rocks overlooking a waterfall. The kids were crying or nearly so. They wanted to go back.
"Has anyone ever done canyoning?" The guide called.
I looked down river. A series of waterfalls, rapids, and rocks trailed off in the distance, descending rapidly down the mountain we had just hiked up.
"I want to go home!" Peter cried.
We have two ways back, I told them. We can go back down the trail ("With the leeches?!") or jump over the waterfall.
Needless to say, neither of these two options particularly appealed to either of the kids. Or, likely, Elise at this point, for that matter. But here we were. So, we all pulled up our proverbial bootstraps and decided the fastest way to get back was to go over the waterfall.
I somehow convinced them the water moved too quickly for them to get any more leeches. I don't actually know if this was true or not, but I believed it at the time.
Canyoning -- just as the name suggests -- is an outdoor activity and mode of travelling in canyons involving scrambling over, climbing up, and scrapping knees and elbows on rocks, jumping over waterfalls, abseiling down cliffs slick with moss, and swimming. There would be four or five jumps or slides, natural slides carved out of the rock by the movement of the water over several centuries or millennia.
The first obstacle was a jump into a natural well of sorts, scooped out of the side of the canyon by repetitive swirling waters. Everyone passed and decided to scoot on their tizus down the rock to the next obstacle.
We proceeded like this, mostly on our bottoms or all fours on the rock, down the canyon, occasionally, jumping off cliffs or sliding down rock slides. Everyone grew braver the more obstacles we successfully completed. Clementine and I went down the rock slides together. I held her in my lap and we slid down the rock, flying off the end, falling several feet, before landing in the water below. Every time, she would wait to go last, steeling herself for the challenge ahead. I never had to force her to go. By the time it was our turn, she would take a deep breath and say to me (without taking her eyes from the water), "Okay...I'm ready."
Right before the last jump, the canyon merged with the trail we had hiked up. Elise and Clementine decided they had enough and were going to take their chances on the path. Elise put Clementine on her back and hiked back down the mountain, carrying her the entire way back to the factory where the pick-up trucks waited for us. The boys and I decided we'd stick to the river which may have been a mistake.
The last jump was high. The cliff was easily several meters high. After we jumped, I tried to swim towards the boys, but was pulled away from them by a current. I tried to scramble up a rock where I could gain purchase and hold on to them, but as I did, Peter thought squiggly contours on the rock were leeches (who was I -- at that point -- to say they weren't?) and panicked. Through their tears, Peter and Sam pulled me off the rock, clutching at me in fear. A colleague who canyoned with us helped me find a path through the rocks with the boys. I was able to stand and I grabbed both Peter and Sam by the life vest. "Look at me," I told them firmly. They did hesitantly. "We're going to be okay, okay?" "Okay," they replied unconvinced. "I won't let anything happen to you."
We pulled ourselves from the rocks and ran down the path past the leeches. We saw Elise and Clementine sitting in the back of the pick-up. I found myself bleeding from a cut on my knee suffered on the last jump. We were all bruised and battered. My shoulders ached from carrying Pete down the mountain through the leech-infested jungle. We bumped back to the riverside hotel just in time for lunch.
The trip was thrilling, amazing, stressful, and physically and emotionally exhausting. In short, epic. Just like the movie.
1 comment:
Great experience for you 🍀
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