Our writer goes for a roll on the spitting fury that is the Padas River in Sabah.
By DAVID WILSON
FORGET upstream and downstream. The normal laws of physics do not apply in Padas where the river writhes, tosses and turns, sending rafters paddling furiously to stay afloat amid its churning white waters.
If you have no idea where Padas is, relax, you are not alone.
From my lodge in Kota Kinabalu, I had to first make a 90-minute minibus journey just to reach the transit station of Beaufort.
Action-packed journey: Screaming was part of the fun when careening down Padas River as these girls soon found out.
That's where I caught Borneo’s only train, which unfortunately runs on what my guide called “rubber time”, meaning it arrives when it chooses and not according to schedule. When it finally rolled in, a cabal of Koreans duly pushed bags through the open windows, reserving all the seats and forcing me to spend this second 90-minute journey standing up, which in hindsight proved to be good white-water rafting practice.
The train, which is just over 30 years old, set off with a sound like a thunderclap.
The journey consisted of juddering halts punctuated by clattering forward phases as we rumbled through the jungle. Unfortunately, this wasn't the verdant jungle inhabited by Tarzan in the movies. Instead of macaques, proboscis monkeys, orangutans, pygmy elephants, crocodiles, hornbills and snakes, only stray dogs, leggy cockerels and egrets deigned to make their presence known to the train passengers by strolling along the tracks.
It was a passage into the virtual unknown, but the river more than made up for the journey getting there.
Straight, yet warped, it entertains whirlpools, eddies and almost indescribable choppy bits that seem to pull in all directions, heaving, straining and kicking.
The sounds of the raging river rang loud as the train rattled through the stomping ground of the Murut (“hill people”). The Murut are, according to Wikipedia, the last of Sabah's ethnic groups to renounce headhunting. My final stop, Pangi Station, boiled down to two things: a straggle of track with some kind of thighbone lying on it and the pink Riverbug tour shack. Outside the shack, I fuelled up on bananas and signed away my right to sue before a safety briefing by Riverbug tour company chief guide Mos (short for “Mosquito”).
Smooth sailor: A kayak virtuoso riding the rapids of Padas River.
After donning the helmet and life jacket, I gave up my valuables to the dry bag, forgetting to remove the pen from my pocket, and hopped into my dinghy, one of 10 carrying 88 other thrill-seekers. All seemed to hail from Macau and, because it was the school holidays, be about 15. Instantly, they started pawing the water and soaking each other.
Unsure what to do, I joined in as the dinghies clashed, wobbled and drifted into the middle of the river. Gales of laughter followed. I was left wondering how we would handle the first rapid.
Not very well, it turned out. Rabidly foaming, it chewed us up and spat us out, shrieking, back into the flood that is Padas River. I wondered which rapid it was – Merry-Go-Round, Break Point or Scooby Doo – as Geoff, our instructor, rallied the troops.
“We are now coming to Cobra Rapid. You must paddle or you will all fall in,” he prosaically announced.
That’s what you call motivation. We started rowing as if in danger of falling into a black hole, and emerged screaming but without casualties. I liked the screaming. It added to the experience.
And, so screaming, we continued over Curve Rapid and Lambada Rapid. Or was it the other way round?
It was hard to hear much. When in doubt, which is most of the time, paddle forward furiously. That helps stop you falling out of your pod. Despite this, someone did fall out in the wake of a particularly vicious procession of cascades. He or she – I couldn’t tell – just seemed to give up and floated, waiting for help to arrive, which does in the guise of a pro who'd been paddling alongside in a kayak.
As the nine-kilometre journey unravelled, the mood turned to one that could easily rival Lord of the Flies. At one point, when we took an arranged collective dip, an Amazonian female crewmember in designer jeans plucked a rock from the riverbed and, with a glint in her eye, raised it high. Thankfully, she only waved it around a bit, before meekly replacing it in the mud.
With a lot of huffing and puffing, we heaved ourselves back into our dinghy. Geoff lent a hand, pulling on our lifejacket straps, as we tumbled gracelessly back into the pod. It seemed a pity when we broke the trip to slake our raging hunger, retrieve our gear and catch the train back. I checked on my pen that valiantly followed me down the river and found it worked better now. Mysteriously, there was also a tube of lipstick with it.
I think I would be quite happy to travel the river’s entire 200-kilometre span. Especially if we could have more spectacular spillages. Or even better – a proper capsize.
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