Nyagui Gorge

12 April 11 - Medium to Low

After two hours of driving, including an hour of dirt roads and rutted tracks, Robin and Hugh realised they'd left their paddles at home!  Eish!  Click here for the official explanation.

We had a late start because I felt a bit of a lie-in was justified on my birthday. We were using unfamiliar dirt roads on the east bank of the river, as opposed to the usual Mukore farm road (which has deteriorated badly this season), which proved pretty good, except for the last km or two.  The east bank option also allows us to break the gorge section into smaller pieces, as opposed to the traditional 25km run.

Due to slow driving by Robin the tortoise, navigational disputes and steep cliffs, Robin and Hugh put in at 10:50 just above the Mukore wave and ran the bottom part of the Mukore section, on to Merlyn's Siphon, Vespids and then about 3.5km of grade 2 and flat water, before dropping over the weir and into the gorge.  The first photos and video in the gorge were taken at 12:20, so I can only assume they made hard work of the flat water, or that Vespids stung them hard.

The first bit of video is of a drop to avoid.  The lads tell me things got gnarly right after the weir, and stayed that way (which supports all the other stories I've heard).  The feeling is that at any higher water it would be a very tough section - well done Andy, Ian, Adrian and the many others who've taken it on at high levels (and no wonder this section is known as a boat eater).

The plan was to complete the entire gorge run of about 6.5km, but by around 14:10 they radioed to say they were about still 1km from the first checkpoint, so it was agreed to end there.  I set about hiring porters, for which Hugh and Robin were most grateful as the walk to the car is pretty steep (up to Leonard and Samuel's village).  They arrived at 14:50, which is a total of 4 hours, of which about 3 would have been spent covering the 3.5km gorge section.

Here are a couple more videos of this section:
Hugh runs a straightforward looking drop,
Robin runs a similar rapid.

The timestamped photos help to tell the story.