After a drive of an hour or so from Taupo, during which we only got lost once, we arrived at the track to the get in for the bottom (shorter but apparently more interesting) section of the river. Timon told us "it's a bit rough in places, but it should be OK if we drive slowly!" and he wasn't kidding. This was probably the worst track I've taken my poor Corolla along, and we did drive very slowly. Which was just as well, because otherwise Mark's car might have ended up at the bottom of the two metre deep wash out we came across about half way along...
With the track impassable by car, still quite a distance to the river and no one keen to carry their boats (strange -normally Timon and Mark would be right into that kind of insanity) we resorted to plan B - driving back along the main road to a higher get-in. As we were getting changed, a friendly farmer herding cows stopped and chatted for a while. He said that in 15 years of farming in the area he'd never seen any kayakers paddling the river from this point. Hmm, did Timon really know what he was doing? Even here it was a ten-minute walk across a paddock from the road to the river, so Mark and I suggested to the others that they could take all four boats to the river while we were driving the shuttle. To our surprise, when we got back we found that the mugs had taken us seriously.
The river started off shallow (and I do mean shallow - I've stepped in deeper puddles) and flowing fast over large flat slabs of rock. Fortunately it soon got deep enough that we could (just) use our paddles. At the first interesting rapid the gradient picked up a little and the river split in two around a small island. We scouted since we couldn't see a clear passage on either side. Both turned out to be OK and pretty straightforward. Mark, Timon and I went left, with Luke opting to paddle the hydroslide to the right.
The next rapid of note was a narrow (a metre or so wide) slot with a small drop and some irritatingly placed rocks. This was where, on a previous occasion, Timon had his paddle ripped out of his hands because it wouldn't fit through the slot. On this day the only reason for paddling it would have been to see how badly we could get our brains bashed in - consequently we all portaged. Again we noticed the weird rock formations - flat slabs of rock covered with just a few inches of water and dotted with almost perfectly round holes, just big enough for a foot to fit down. Luckily nobody found one by accident because I checked one out with my paddle and it was nearly two metres deep.
The river continued on with a number of small rapids, until we got to the first of the "hard ones". For reasons that will become clear shortly I didn't get a lot of time to look at this, but here is what I remember. Mark and Luke had paddled on ahead and when Timon and I came around the corner we saw they had eddied out. I just figured they were waiting for us to catch up, when suddenly Timon said "We're here" and spun into the eddy. It was then that I realised that the others had eddied out just above where most of the river (about ten metres wide at that point) was pouring down a three metre wide, two metre high drop on the hard right. At this point, I should have said "Oh fuck!" and gone for it. Instead, in one of those (not so rare) moments of bad judgement, I said "Oh fuck!" and tried to make the eddy (at least I got the first part right!). Sadly, the water above the drop was too shallow and fast flowing to manage a good paddle stroke and the other bastards hadn't left enough room anyway. So all I managed to do was spin my boat around leaving me perfectly lined up to go over the drop backwards with no boat speed. At that point it all becomes a little hazy, but I remember getting pushed upside down into the left-hand wall, requiring several attempts to roll, just succeeding before going over a second drop. Miraculously, I missed a large rock at the bottom of this drop and floated out the bottom of the rapid, still facing upstream. Another backward descent to add to my collection! Slightly shaken, but otherwise none the worse for wear I then waited while the other three ran the rapid with somewhat more style but considerably less drama.
There were a few more rapids that I don't remember much about and then came the second hard rapid. This one was similar to the previous but perhaps a bit harder due to some ugly looking hydraulics after the first drop and a narrower gap with a buffer wave on the right after the second. It did have the advantage of a chicken chute on river left which I quickly decided I would be taking, but Mark and Luke wanted to see what happened to Timon before making up their minds. And what happened was a perfect vertical tail stand after the first drop, which could easily have become a back loop in lesser hands but which was instead stylishly converted into a pirouette turn, leaving him facing upstream in a micro eddy. Unfortunately he now couldn't get enough speed up for the second drop and so got splatted against a rock by the buffer wave. I was just a couple of metres away with a throw bag but Timon's deck had popped and he had little choice but to abandon his sinking ship. This was apparently his first swim in a while and he said he'd had a great time. But he had also convinced Mark and Luke that the chicken chute looked more appealing so the rest of us all ended up taking that option.
After that the river was pretty flat for a kilometre or so until the end.
On the whole this was a fun section. The top half needed a bit more water but the bottom half was good. Unfortunately the washed out track to the river is unlikely to be repaired anytime soon (it didn't exactly look like a high traffic route) so just doing the shorter bottom section will most likely require a boat carry/drag of a few kilometres. Having said that, we did pass under a small bridge near the mid-point so it's possible that there is road access from the other side. Next time I'm up that way I'll have to go exploring
Duncan