Paddling the Lower Karnali River, Western Nepal, November/December 2018
by Roy McHale
The Lower Karnali River had been on my hit list for a while and I finally got the chance to paddle it after I convinced several other Liverpool Canoe Club members to join me on the adventure. The team consisted of myself, Tom Morris, Mark Young, Nathan Marsden and Rich & Liz Reeves. We decided to use a company called Paddle Nepal, who the club have used previously, to supply kayaks and organise the logistics of getting to the river which is situated in Nepal’s remote western region. The Karnali is Nepal’s longest river and along with its tributaries drains most of the far west of Nepal, the Wild West as many people call it.
Tom, Mark, Nathan and I flew from London
Heathrow to Delhi then onto Kathmandu. We had a pretty good flight with Jet
Airlines and arrived on the Saturday before the trip started the following
Tuesday. In order to fill the days before the trip we had arranged to go to a
river festival called the “Himalayan White-Water Challenge”.
I have been to Nepal before, but I had forgotten how much you need to be on your toes when you leave the airport. We immediately got mobbed by locals all trying to make a few rupees by trying to carry our cases and offering lifts into the city and even though we had organised a Jeep to meet us and take us to the festival and we pushed our bags to the jeep ourselves Tom still managed to get fleeced for £20 because the locals loaded the cases into the jeep.
The journey to the river festival took around 7 hours and it started with an epic journey through Kathmandu’s rush hour traffic and continued through the dusk and into the night along Nepal’s notoriously bad roads. If you think of congestion, blaring horns, dust, pollution, going 4 up on a moped, overtaking around blind bends, near misses and miles and miles of gravel roads you’ll get the idea of the journey.
We arrived at the river festival which
was being held on the Marshyangdi River around 11.30pm and we slept in tents
that had been pre-erected by Paddle Nepal. We woke the next day and had coffee
and some curried beans and eggs for breakfast. The rest of the day was filled
with chatting to the multi-national group of paddlers attending the festival and
competing in the extreme slalom race, the section of the Marshyangdi where the
race was being held was a grade 5 section and the course was technical and pushy
but there was good safety team waiting to fish people out if they swam and the
day went smoothly apart from one upset when an Irish competitor dislocated his
should on his second run. The festival generates a lot of interest in Nepal and
I along with a number of other paddlers get interviewed for a Nepalese tv show.
On the night we went up into the local village for food which was spicy fried
noodles and we ended up having a few beers, some Nepalese rum and the local home
brew which is called Roxy. After my last trip to Nepal I swore never to touch
Roxy again due to the bad hangover it gives but that must have slipped my mind
after the beers and the rum. There was a party going on back at the festival
site which went on into the early hours.
The following day, a bit fragile, after the Roxy we decided to give
the racing a miss and instead we went into the village for a late breakfast and
around midday caught a local bus up the valley about 5 kilometers and we kayaked
the upper section of the Marshyangdi back to the festival site, we were joined on
the run by a Spanish paddler we had met called Xabi. The Marshyangdi is a
top-class river it flows through a beautiful 
valley, the water is clean, and the
rapids are mostly technical drops in between huge house sized boulders,
definitely a river for the tick list if you ever go to Nepal. Later that day we
loaded our kayaks and other paddling kit onto the Paddle Nepal bus and headed
to Pokhara where Paddle Nepal have their HQ, we stayed the night in Pokhara.
The following morning, we woke early and headed over to the paddle Nepal HQ where we were introduced to Patrick and Michael, two Aussie paddlers, who were joining us on the trip. We were also introduced to the Nepalese guides who were going with us. These were Sayas, Naresh, Ram, Jung, Nuna and Nabin. We drove across Nepal for about 12 hours until we came to a town called Mugling where we stayed the night in a hotel. We also met up with Rich and Liz who had flew to Nepalgunj from Kathmandu rather than endure the long bus journey. We all had a meal of Dall Bhat and a good night’s sleep before we headed to the Karnali the following day.
Day
1 - long drive from Mugling to the get in at Dungeswar. Left hotel at 5am
arrived at river around 11.30 stopped in a crazy village along the way for
breakfast of samosa and boiled eggs. River got going within 100 meters big
waves trains and the main river signal of the day was ‘middle, middle’. That
night we camped on a beach at the side of the river, great food and big drift
wood fire, never bothered with a tent slept underneath a tarp.
Day 2 - Easier water today, read and run rapids. Easy sections of around grade 3-3+ big waves trains mega fun! Camp that night was freezing, wind blew through the tarp.
Day 3 – The difficulty of the river increased, and we came across some named rapids the first was called Sweetness and Light – a steady line that was quite easy to get then some big holes to avoid on river left and a big wave train down the bottom. Second rapid was called Jailhouse Rock, big huge hole river right then another in the middle. Line was left at top then over to the right. Tom swam in second hole, both shoes ripped off and pants half way down, rest of the day steady paddling.
Day 4 - Another big day with 3 main rapids. Gods house (grade 4+) Juicer (grade 4) and Juicer Two (flip and strip, grade 4). Gods house started straight away with a must make line, huge hole on the left then a tongue over to the right. Juicer 2 had a shoot on the left and in the middle, there was two big holes that needed to be avoided. Later that day we entered a section that was described to us as 6 kilometres of continuous rapids. On nearly the first wave of the section I sort of got back looped rolled up went into a hole which I surfed for a bit then capsized couldn’t roll and swam luckily the section wasn’t as continuous as I first imagined, and I managed to get reunited with my boat and paddle quite quickly.
Day
5 - Some easy big volume grade 3 wave trains to get going followed by a stop at
a local village to buy a pig. Two men from the village slaughtered the pig and
we took it on the raft for our meal that night. It was a long easy paddle to
camp which was on a long beach on a bend of the river. Behind and in front were
jungle clad escarpments that looked like they could have been straight out of
an Arthur Conan Doyle novel. On closer inspection there were large tiger prints
in the sand. We built a huge bonfire and had BBQ pork. I must admit seeing the
tiger prints made us all a bit nervous that night.
Day
6 - first section little bit interesting. long day, mellow paddle on mostly
flat water but the water was moving fast. Some easy 2 sections on the bends. 1
big main rapids part way down with some wave trains. Big eddies either side so
could play about. Camp great set up with some big drift wood logs for a big
fire.
Day 7 – A flat but scenic paddle. Campsite on an island that in higher water would be submerged Sayas, Nathan and I went to local village to get beer and rum. On the way back, I fell and smashed 2 bottles of rum not a good start, but we bought some more and Sayas made some rum punch and great food. Big fire to chill around.
Day 8 - Final paddle was short. Finished in Chisipani which is the gateway town to the Bardia National Park area. We had more Dahl Baht for lunch in a little local tea house with farm animals roaming around... 2hr journey on the bus to Nepalgunj airport before flying back to Kathmandu. Part of the journey was through the Bardia National Park and we stopped on a bridge over the river where we were able to view crocodiles, turtles and shoals of huge fish.
Back in Kathmandu we spent the day around the Tamel area haggling with traders over the price of souvenirs before having a boozy night in the hole in the wall bar.
On reflection it was a great trip both on and off the river, the group dynamic was fantastic with plenty of banter and laughter throughout the trip.
Karnali River trip - Nepal, 2018 by Nathan Marsden with Tom Morris, Roy McHale, Richard and Liz Reeves and Mark Young
Huge thanks to Paddle Nepal!
