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“Let’s make sure, we don’t capsize and fall into the river,” I cautioned my team but in a cheery voice. I climbed back into the raft shivering and disappointed. As we started rolling down the river in our rubber raft, I deliberately threw myself into the river to check the efficacy of our wetsuits against the frigid waters. The villagers of Hamzigond, along with the local civil and military administration, gathered at the bridge on the Indus and sent us off with lots of cheers and prayers. Rafting through Kharmang in Baltistan region | Eyebex Films Flustered and indignant at this sudden intrusion in our plan and helpless in the face of rigid military procedures, we commenced our expedition from Hamzigond on the first day of March 2022. The usual reasons of border sensitivity were cited and we were not allowed to proceed further.
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But when we arrived at Hamzigond, about eight kilometres short of Olding, armed with a No-Objection Certificate (NOC), our spirits charged with excitement, we were stopped dead in our tracks at a military checkpost. The Giglit-Batistan government had authorised us to start our expedition from the bridge on the River Indus close to Olding, about three kilometres from the LoC. It then makes its wild foray into Pakistan after crossing the Line of Control (LoC) close to the village of Olding in Baltistan. River Indus, the untamed lion, the legendary Sindhu, as mentioned in the ancient script of Rig Veda, rises in the mountains of Tibet, and travels for a few hundred kilometres before it enters the Ladakh region in India-occupied Kashmir. Sanif Jamal and Atif Amin, hailing from Karimabad in Hunza Valley, joined the expedition as river-rafting guides, while Sultan Karim from Ghulkin in Hunza was taken onboard as a white-water rescue expert because of his swimming prowess. Besides the three main members of Expedition Indus, including myself, ABM Faisal and Farman Ahmed, there were three other members who joined us in the northern leg of our journey. We started our rafting expedition from Hamzigond in the Baltistan region and were heading south to Karachi, a challenge nobody had taken on before. We were Expedition Indus, a six-member team that had set out to raft the entire course of River Indus in Pakistan and we were fighting for our lives, grappling with a huge rapid in the Indus, somewhere downstream from the town of Besham in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. And just when we thought we had some control over our raft, we were swallowed by yet another hole.Ī group of intrepid adventurers decide to raft down the length of the Mighty Indus to document how the ‘river of life’ is currently faring in face of environmental degradation and human intervention. I could see waves crashing all around him as the strong current swept him further away from us. Then I saw him come up from under a big wave and disappear under another huge one. I looked around desperately but couldn’t see Farman anywhere. At that moment, I felt like I was being sucked into a deep watery abyss as tons of water came crashing down on us.Īs we surfaced, I could see Sanif and Sultan in the water, clinging to the side of the raft, struggling to haul themselves back in. Before I could steady myself, our raft emerged from the first hole and fell backwards into another big one to its left. There was a big thud as I flew from the raft’s stern and crashed on top of Faisal, who had fallen on the bow of the boat. Then, all of a sudden, everything went topsy-turvy as our raft fell headlong into an enormous hole. The strong current pushed us straight towards the waterfall that was plummeting right into a huge hole. As we neared the rapid, we noticed a young man standing on the far-left side of the river, frantically waving at us and pointing us to move towards the right side of the river.īewildered and frightened by the horrifying sight of the massive class 5 rapid that suddenly loomed ahead, we started paddling hard towards our right.
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We could hear the deafening roar of the big water in the distance.