Hello Mzungu!

I tried to post this 2 days ago but the internet connection here is so slow and so sporadic that I couldn't.

So I've arrived safely and have had a couple of days on the river already.
Things didn't quite go to plan today when our lunches for the trip didn't
arrive till it was too late to do the run. This is how things work out here
it seems. The internet connection avaiable is sporadic at best, and
sometimes there's just no power.

We're staying at NRE for now while we're getting our bearings. It's a bit of
a dump at first but the place grows on you. The atmosphere is great, very
friendly and very relaxed. We'll probably move down to the Hairy Lemon next
week for a while.

On the water things have been going great. The water is incredibly high
volume out here, unlike nothing I've ever seen. It's really made me adjust
theway I paddle. Eddies are not somewhere you want to be on this river,
they're surging and boiling and will throw you about almost as much as the
rapid itself, and because there's so much water in them it's very difficult
to get out of them and back into the flow. So the end result is that you
just have to keep paddling hard and keep dodging the holes. the holes have
to be seen to be believed though. We were given a line to run yesterday
where we had to "dodge right of a bit of a hole" at one point. I was
wondering going into the rapid would it be easy to spot, and true enough it
was. As I was cresting the wave upstream of it all I could see was a hole
about the size of a minibus munching away after the nest wave. It was an
easy move to make to miss it but I'm wondering what a big hole looks like
out here if that was just a bit of one.

Off the water the locals are really great. They're very friendly and
everywhere you go there are kids waving at you shouting "hello mzungu!" (the
only English most of them have) and holding their hand out looking for some
money. Mzungu is the Swahili word for a white man I've learned, and the
locals insist that it is no way derogarory. It really is amazing how little
these people have, and how much they do with what they have got. They're
very resourceful and if they don't have anything they'll promise you the
world they can get it for you if you can throw them a few shillings.