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Outside Magazine March 2003

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DESTINATIONS SPECIAL: The Scouting Expedition
A Trip is Born (Cont.)

Day 13, mile 302
"Hari! Hari! Hari! Get up! Get up! There's paddling to be done today!"

Clinton was at the tent I shared with Josh, yelling at us to hurry—yelling, in fact, to awaken everyone in camp. It was 5:30 a.m. We'd had a single day's rest. People laughed, it was so Clintonian.

A few hours below Luwire, the river began braiding again.

"Hey, this is pretty intense," Josh noted from the bow of my boat as we flew through whitewater chutes and banged off tree limbs.

"Hey, this is pretty dangerous," he observed moments later, as crocs launched themselves off riverbanks and we back-paddled furiously from a bolting hippo.

"Hey, did you see that big white snake in the last little channel?" he asked a few minutes later. "It was crawling on a branch about a foot from our shoulders."

I found the tandem more maneuverable with Josh, who weighed far less than Steve and learned paddling quickly. Still, we broadsided a rock at a hairpin bend and I gave him a Lugenda baptism.

Around one o'clock, we heard Jamie's bush plane buzzing overhead. He radioed down to one of Rod's several communication devices to report that Paul Connolly had passed Luwire's satellite camp a few hours before. He was hard on our heels.

"There is absolutely no way I'm going to let Paul Connolly get to the confluence before we do," Cherri announced.

"Expect to paddle late today," Rod proclaimed to everyone. "And tomorrow, we'll be on the river at first light."

What is this? I wondered. We survived the rapids and now we're in a race?

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