BIG BLUE
Rafting the Abay Wenz: High Adventure in Ethiopia's Blue Nile Gorge
Story and photographs by BRUCE KIRKBY (continued from previous page)


The Blue Nile -- Abay Wenz, as Ethiopians know it -- cuts a massive gorge through the Ethiopian highlands: an enormous semicircle that first heads south, slowly turns west, and finally swings northwards as it leaves the hills, spilling into the flat plains bordering Sudan. Deceptively peaceful as it flows tranquilly from Lake Tana at its source, the Blue Nile meanders through 30 kilometres of low reed islands and broad rapids before thundering over the majestic Tissisat Falls and entering a series of constricted canyons. This is, as Alan Moorehead writes in his definitive history of the river, "the end of all peace on the Blue Nile." From here on "it tears and boils along too fast for any ordinary boat to live upon the surface." Dropping a staggering 1,500 metres over its course, the river carves a gorge in the Ethiopian plateau that is at places nearly two kilometres deep and 24kilometres from rim to rim, humbling even the Grand Canyon.

Named for their respective colours, the two major tributaries forming the Nile meet in Khartoum, where their waters flow side by side for kilometres before finally mixing. It was on the White Nile -- the longer and arguably more famous of the two -- that Sir Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke made their reputations during the search for the source of the world's longest river. Lesser known, and until recently largely unexplored, the Blue Nile is no meagre cousin.

Long notorious as the domain of bandits and highwaymen -- known locally as shifta -- the Blue Nile Gorge was unmapped until the 1920s. It wasn't until 1968 that a British Army group led by the infamously tough Col. Blatchford-Snell became the first to explore the river's entire length. The expedition endured several intense gun battles with the shifta, countless crocodile attacks and a drowning. Only a handful of groups have travelled there since. Recently, an American disappeared without a trace, and a group of Swiss boaters were shot in their bags while sleeping on a beach. Officials sent to investigate the murders found a local tribesman casually fishing on the river's banks, using cubes of human flesh as bait.

I was here as part of a group of adventurers that included two other raft guides, a paramedic, a photographer, a writer and a videographer. Our team had come to Africa to travel the 1,000-kilometre length of the Blue Nile, rafting most of the way, borne along by the high waters that follow the rainy season. However, the same water that would allow us to navigate the sluggish sections downstream had turned the constricted upper canyon into an unrunnable stretch of continuous class VI rapids. We would trek the first 100 kilometres of the gorge before continuing on by raft.

I had arrived in Addis Ababa.. story continued.