White Water River Rafting at Rishikesh

Last weekend I and Kundan with our families, planned for white water river rafting. We booked a camp and a raft with a vendor and started off from Delhi on Saturday morning at 7:00 A.M. According to our plans we had to travel 230 Km as haridwar is 210 km and then 20 Km more for Rishikesh, but due to pathetic roads and horrible traffic jams it took us complete 12 hours to reach there. So we reached our camp at 7:00 P.M. Then we had a bath in the sub river of Ganges and had some snacks. The camps were good but a little bit humid, might be because of the weather.

We had our dinner at 9:00 and then went for sleep as we were very tired of long driving. In the morning we wake up at 5:00, and had a view of the marvelous sunrise in the valley. Then we went out for a small photo shoot. Had our breakfast at the camp and then we got the call from raft manager.

After a couple of minutes we were at our raft listing to the instructions and commands which we were supposed to follow. We were a team of two boys and 7 girls.

After this session we moved our raft in the middle of river Ganges with a started off with huge cheers, saying "Ganga maiya ki jai", thrice. Soon after starting we met our first rapid. We met four rapids in our 16 km journey. Out of them "Roller Coaster" was the biggest. Our raft was going up and down on 16-20 feet waves. In between our guide asked us to jump in the water. That was a thrilling experience as the water was chilled and we were moving in the current with support of a single rope on the sides of the raft. In midway we did cliff jumping. There was a rock, around 10 feet high. We were supposed to jump from there into the flowing river which is 50 feet deep. That was the most rocking experience we ever had. When you stand at the top of the cliff and look down at the gushing current, it increases your heartbeat and you have to gain a lot of courage, but once you jumped, it feels like you are falling without any gravity. We jumped three times, and were willing to do more, but due to time restrictions, we moved our raft towards Laxman Jhoola and ended our adventurous journey there. Then we drove back to Delhi which again took 9 hours. In between we visited Patanjali Ashram of Baba RamDev. The road and driving conditions are really pathetic. Except this the rafting experience was marvelous. It was a life time experience.