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| Scene from the campsite |
I wake up urging myself to do the bungee jump. I must face down my fear I tell myself. I can’t decide, so I flip a box of matches, coins being rare in Nepal. Despite increasing the best out of quantity from one to three, then to five and then to seven, the matches still tell me no bungee.
I am glad that I went white water rafting though, as it was much more exciting than the Upper Seti one we did when we were at Pokhara. Excepting the guide, our boat crew are all UK to Ozzers, including myself and Laurie. The guide tells Laurie to keep calm as he senses she is panicky, but relative to our previous experiences she is calmer than usual. Also present is the superficially serious Irishman Shay who has taken to mocking my eccentricities, so it is satisfying to see him manage to break his oar and his lifejacket and to fall in the river three times. His flip flops seem to be magnetic though, as they come off with each over-boarding but they are rescued each time. The last fall involved all of us, as the boat near capsized as we collided with another boat that was stuck on some rocks, dumping six of us in the rapid. Only the guide and Stephen, the retired solicitor from Yorkshire, managed to stay in. The boat landed on my head and I had a few panicky seconds underneath, but we all managed to get back in. The other boat, which had actually capsized, had most of its crew floating solitarily down various points of the river. It brings home how dangerous rafting can be and we learn that someone had drowned in this river a month before. But, boy was it fun.
Tomorrow we pass into Tibet.
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