Category: Stories
Faf on the river – a Nikita entry for the WM blog
Posted by Rupert on February 5, 2009
Saturday 31st of the 1st month of 2009 (january ) and we are off to our very own land to do some fun work, yipee. today we are to make some type of raised bed for somthing or other , growing plants i think , but for som unfathomable reason we must make a sort of stick wall ??? it all takes a lot of time and hassel and faf but in the end it is finished ,hurah.
by now it is about one on the clock in the afternoon and me and sweet kiwi go up to coca hipermarcados (coca supermarket) to do some food and cake shopping for lunch. buying the cakes was especially nice. when we get back to the land we find tata talking to some dude in not so good portuguese but he manages and then i find out that he has come to take us to do some kayaking. my spirits sudenly take a serious rise as i thought to myself “nice fat rivers after long time of rain” and ive been waiting a very long time for this”. me and mon pa left the land ensuring the girls that we would be no longer than two hours because we were expecting to be in the water in about half an hours time.
it took about fifteen minutes to get to the guys house and then anouther half an hour to get all the gear on, by then we realized that it would be much longer than two hours before we got back to pick up the girls. when we finally slid our kayaks into the water we tought to ourselves “wow , this is cool”. me and tata had to get the hang of it quickly because there was no fafing around trying to get it wired. the river was more like a really long set of steps than a river because every few hundred meters there would be a damm to divert the water to a mill but most of the damms were unmaintained so the water would go through the damm instead of to the canal and every time we’d get to one we’d have to get out of our boat and see if it was possible to go down because of the rocks.
most of them we couldn’t go down so we had to walk around them which took a long time which was very anoying but the most anoying things of all were the tree branches and fallen trees in the river which we would try to avoid but most of the time get it wrong and go through them along with all the bramble vines drapsing over the river which earned us a great many cuts on our hands. by the time we finally managed to pick up the girls from Coca we had been three and a half hours! when we got there we expecting to never be able to do that again but they wern’t too harsh. dispite all the injury the kayaking was really quite fun. i thought it was a very good day .
Nikita
February 5th, 2009 at 18:58
What a lovely report from Nikita. Well done! More please!
February 6th, 2009 at 16:37
That sounds like a lot of fun. I’m jealous