The descent.

The door is shut behind us.

My fingernails scrape the wall. Searching in vain. I need a handhold. Right now.

We are locked deep within a gorge. I am up to my neck in white-water and hopelessly out of depth. 30 feet of blank, featureless rock sides are shutting us in on both sides and heavy rainfall has turned the river Wara into a boiling colossus of white-water.

There is no escape and no way back. The force is irrepressible and unavoidable. It presses my back, tears at my packraft and pushes me on, remorselessly towards an enormous set of truly obscene rapids.

Both Callum and I are out of our rafts. We are swimming free, unable to mount the boats, out of control, searching, praying for some slack water.

I scan the rock again.

If I can just find a place to hold on, an eddy or an undercut, we might be able to get out of this. But there is nothing and we are bearing down on the rapids fast now. I stare them up and down. Noisy. Really aggressive. Full of rock and relentless.

Be honest Will, you know it’ll easily kill you both.

Pointless. Utterly pointless. I think to myself, turning in the flow.

A lump on the wall…I spot a small lump in the wall.

I reach out. My whole right hand closes round a bump of cold wet rock. It feels really solid. I pull in hard, the raft swings in the flow, my left hand slaps the wall under the water and finds a hole. I shove my whole middle finger in up to the knuckle and pull with everything I have left. The lump has created six-inches of slack water in its lee. It isn’t much but it gives me the vital seconds I need to spot an eddy and a small tabletop sized rock filled beach. I crawl round. A fingerling ridge, a flake of rock, an imperceptible sub-aqua crack – just three climbing moves to sanctuary. My fingers are tearing in the flow and my shoulder begs me to let go of the rock face, but I won’t. I can’t. Suddenly I am in the eddy and screaming at Callum. Praying he can pull off an identical series of manoeuvres.

He makes it. We hug.

13^th April

I still think about it all the time.

I have tried to write this all down several times but it is still so unreal in my head that I wondered whether I should write it at all.

It was by no means the most dangerous moment of the descent, but it was the total lack of control that really sticks in my mind. Getting sucked in towards those deadly rapids with seemingly no way of stopping. It was like that nightmare where you are being chased by something truly awful and you suddenly forget how to run.

In truth I hate thinking about moments like this, but I chose to write it all down in the end as, I guess, it is the foil to all the larking about I’ve written about in these blogs so far. That horrible moment really taps into the reality we face up to when taking on these projects. I knew full well before this expedition had even started that it was going to be a big step up for us both. It was important that we both accepted the risks that were inherent from the outset. We were pushing forward into the complete unknown with very limited equipment and zero support. There was always a chance that something terrible could happen to either one of us and the fact it didn’t this time was down to good kit, skill, determination, but mostly, just plain good luck.

It was an experience I wouldn’t want to repeat in a hurry and it, and all that happened next, was never part of my plan, but when you venture to these places you have to make a trade off; it can be scary and risky, but it can be marvelous too.

Reading this blog you would be forgiven for thinking it isn’t worth it at all, but please allow me time to change your mind in this space a bit later on.

Happy blog next time I promise.

Well, maybe the one after next.

“But, hang on, what happened in between the last blog and this one Will?” 

Well…

We made it out of the forest to the sublime Wara village on day nineteen of the project. The village was just a grass clearing in the forest, a wonderful cluster of conical wooden huts and a simple church. The people were extremely kind, warm and 

understanding. Most spoke their own language, a Yali dialect, but a couple could speak Indonesian so I was able to get just enough information regarding a forward route. I learnt that Wara village was indeed the last of the Yali villages before the lowlands, but it was not the head of a great connecting northern trade route. In fact, no one had ever descended from their position before, bar a few workers once intent on forcing an overland route for cars and trucks to the coast of Jayapura.

When the people of Wara needed to trade they simply headed back up through the forest to the town of Elelim. It was a dead end. An isolated spoke off the great trade routes of the highlands and not the start to an independent route connecting the lowlands that I had hoped it might be.

We had reached an impasse. The project could have finished right there but I felt there was a good chance we could still find a way to the Mamberamo alone. Our satellite map showed the Wara met a much larger river, known locally as the Bogor, that would eventually flow into the Mamberamo and out to the coasts. Going forward was undoubtedly a risk but we had the supplies and packrafts to pull off the descent if the river conditions remained good. The river Wara was hard but not impassable, and there was always a chance we might find a population of people between Wara village and the headwaters of the Mamberamo that were still using the river route to trade, but were hitherto unknown.

It just felt right to continue.

Three days later we found ourselves trapped in that gully after consecutive days of bad weather. We couldn’t go back up the river as the flow was too strong and the sides were just too steep to climb out. We had no option but to keep moving downstream.

It would take us a week before we eventually made it to the Bogor. A week of swimming, hauling and rafting on just 800 calories a day in atrocious river conditions. By the end I had experienced staggering weight loss and we had both sustained injuries. Every single one of our dry bags had flooded, damaging our technical and medical kit, and sweeping away some items altogether. We were engaged in running repairs to the packrafts and utterly isolated.

It was the twenty-eighth day of the expedition.