the quiet revolution

[Here be parts 1, 2 & 3]

I apologise for the delay in getting part 4 up here. I had a draft half-finished but lost it a few weeks ago when my hard drive died. I need to buy a new computer, but in the meantime I've resuscitated an ancient lap top and got it working well enough that I have no more excuses for not posting. Ok, ok, I'll get on with it!

Day 5: Now where was I? Ah yes, camped at Coruscades and enjoying an early morning on the river. Slowly the rest of the camp stirred and people joined me out on the rocks, watching the sunlight slowly slide it's way down into the deep gorge. Brett, our trip leader and normally the first one up, remained steadfastly in bed, putting off the day ahead as long as possible. At loose ends, the rest of us read books, wandered about, went back to sleep or settled down on a convenient boulder to soak up some sun.



Eventually Brett found the motivation to get up and we packed all the gear and carried it a couple of hundred metres downstream down a pretty winding path, to wait while Brett and fellow guide Jim brought the rafts down through the tricky section at the top of Coruscades rapids. We then loaded up the rafts and finally paddled out around midday to see what the last day of 2011 would bring us down the River.



Not far downstream the River brought us to the Faucet, one of the most fun rapids of the trip (and not just because no portage was required!). Pure rushing water joy!



The Faucet behind us, we hit the major portages of the day and worked out why Brett had been so reluctant to get out of bed: Sidewinder, Thunder-rush and the Cauldron. The waters were tricky and we unloaded and re-loaded the raft many times. As the day wore on I wore down, feeling sicker and sicker as my choice of left-overs for breakfast decided to disagree with me. There's no room for resting on the River, however, so we all just got on with it and eventually my guts ceased grumbling and I made the most of our last proper day on the water.



Once past the portages of the Great Ravine the river opened out, giving us a gentle paddle through the forested green slopes, spotted with the white blooms of flowering leatherwood trees and the red shoots of fresh summer growth from the myrtles. We saw a family of endangered Tasmanian white-bellied sea eagles watching the world drift by from a branch over the water, a pair of wedge-tail eagles circling their territory high above and a party of great cormorants startled several times by our appearance up-river. They were happily added to our wildlife tally for the trip, including two platypus sightings, some devil scats and suspected quoll tracks.

We paddled in companionable quiet, stopping here and there to explore a creek joining the river, cool off with a quick drink or just to admire the view until we made our unhurried way to camp at Rafter's Basin, around 8 pm ( wherein we saw in the New Year and eventually made our ways home again. )

[Day 1 is here]

Day 2: I woke early to a beautiful morning and enjoyed a half-hour or so of quietness to myself before the rest of the camp began to stir. We packed, breakfasted and got back in the rafts, or in my case, the kayak, and set off for our first full day on the Franklin. The morning was uneventful; largely gentle paddling with decreasingly-frequent stops to drag the rafts through shallow sections. I had the hang of my kayak and the trust of the guides so was largely left to my own devices all morning, and derived far too much amusement from watching Sam, the boy in the other kayak, repeatedly capsize. Yes, I can be a little cruel sometimes.

At lunch time I swapped with Jeddah (and Espen swapped with the water-logged Sam) and took my place in a raft with Nikki, Wayne and guide Jim. It was quite different to need to work as a team and respond quickly to Jim's instructions, and frustrating to be stuck with the consequences when someone in the team wasn't pulling their weight.



By afternoon tea time we're dragging the rafts a lot less and Brett makes the call to deflate the "ducks", so we're all in the rafts now. Just in time, too, as we soon encounter our first serious obstacle of the trip: a jammed-tight log in a narrow slot that Jim nick-names the Tipper. It's every-body out and a lot of hard work to lift the loaded rafts up and see-saw them over the top of the log. All the men are heaving (except Wayne - a recurring theme), lifting and pulling the heavy raft with nothing for footing but the same wet log the raft's on top of and some rather slippery rocks and I start to realise how serious this rafting business really is.




Eventually we get both rafts clear of the Tipper, but it's only a short stretch of smooth paddling before we hit the first of the dangerous rapids, known to have claimed a few lives: Nasty Notch. We all pile out onto the rocks and the rafts are dragged through and dropped into the downstream side and we glide our way through a glorious afternoon down to the night's camp: Irenabyss. Rumour has it this was to be the site of the 3rd dam proposed under the Franklin scheme, though I've never seen anything official. It's a pretty little gorge in steep country, nestled under the impressive white-quartz peak of Frenchman's Cap. A beautiful spot, I'm very glad the river's still wild and free.



Camp is made under the trees (I claim an isolated spot up on top of the rocks) with hours of daylight to spare, so the more energetic of us cross the river with Jim to try a walk up a ridge that Brett recommends (notably, Brett stays put at camp). The trail to the ridge is steep and very over-grown in places. We're all in shorts as the afternoon is warm, and pretty soon our shins are scratched up from the unforgiving vegetation. We follow Jim up until the trail peters out and two of our party get bitten by inchman ants (luckily not jack-jumpers, which were also about). A group decision is made to turn back, and somehow Jim loses the trail a couple of times on the way back down, so we go cross-country and follow wombat trails until the track appears again and we finally make our way back down to the river, legs scraped and bloody. When we get back to camp Brett just laughs and we all learn a lesson about his sense of humour.



The night is overcast and warm, and after a tasty dinner I flake out quickly, falling into a deep sleep in my mossy grotto (with repaired air mattress) only to wake in confusion several hours later to find Brett shining a torch in my face. It had started raining and tarps had been set up down below. Begrudgingly I woke up enough to gather my things and move down to the tarped area, claiming a small patch of dirt between Espen and Sam and spending the rest of the night dozing off then waking up to the snoring. Boo.



Day 3: The morning crept in grey and damp to find me grumpy and underslept. This was the morning we were supposed to climb up to Frenchman's Cap: an arduous ascent but one I'd been looking forward to. But with the peak lost to low clouds and a disrupted night's sleep, no-one could summon the motivation necessary to get up and get going. So the walk was called off, we slept in and a lazy morning was had. We didn't hit the river until 11 am, but consequently didn't make camp that evening until it was nearly dark: some time after 8 pm. The rafts were re-shuffled before we left and I was pleased to find myself swapped out of Jim's raft and into Brett's, with the rest of the science-nerd introverts on the trip: Kevin, Niall and Jeddah. I'd spend the rest of the trip with them and appreciated the quiet company, intelligent conversation and shared physical effort.



Lead raft: Guided by Brett, owner and operator of Water By Nature, a quiet man with a slightly vicious sense of humour who knows the river backwards. Crewed by me, Jedda (lovely & competent 22 year-old graduate Environmental Engineer from Melbourne) and the Scottish half-brothers (Kevin, 40, an electrical engineer who designs next-generation tanks and APCs for the British military, currently living in Cardiff, and Niall, 37, qualified marine biologist now making furniture and large metal sculptures, living in Bondi with his wife and baby daughters).

Second raft: Guided by Jim, who's not worked for Brett for long and runs his own rafting business in Scotland during our winters. Jim is more sociable than Brett and bestows nick-names on us all, except Wayne (a 50 year-old accountant from Brisbane who doesn't pull his weight in the raft and spends the portages surreptitiously filming us all with his camera strapped to his life-jacket), who becomes Creepy Wayne by popular consensus. Then there's Nikki (an amazingly fit 50-something animal behaviouralist from Sydney's Taronga Zoo, born and raised in South Africa, whom Jim spends the rest of the trip on the pull, possibly successfully), Sam (a 22-going-on-16 year old nouveau-bogan chippy from Melbourne with a good heart, a short attention span and a talent for annoyingness. He's spoilt rotten by his parents, with whom he still lives and who sent him on this $2k trip as a birthday present: in short he's your friend from high-school's annoying little brother, magnified) and my friend Es (a 35 year old chef and logistics manager on a mine site in the middle of nowhere, Queensland, whom I love as a brother but wish would learn to value and look after himself).



The rafting itself was fairly straight-forward, with no major obstacles to negotiate. The most dramatic event of the day occurred when our raft spun backwards unexpectedly while traversing a rapid, slamming into a very large log downstream. Except the log was higher than the raft edge, so the surface that collected and absorbed the impact was my arse. Yeah, that made me wince a little (and left a spectacular haematoma right across the left cheek).

Camp was made on a sandy beach, with conversation over cask wine extending late into the evening before we drifted off for another chilly night under a sky full of brilliant stars.