The student life.(+a video!)

So, my first term at Uni was not very productivel in terms of kayaking, but there was a lot of other stuff going on, including drama, rowing and climbing, the lack of a car in Oxford also meant I had to rely on other people.
By the end of term I was desperate for a white water hit, so on the day after the end of term I headed down to Exeter for the Sunday of the G17 weekend to paddle with Hugh Graham and got the Upper Dart at the perfect level and a cheeky run down the Erme.
After that I headed up to North Wales to meet up with Broadley and did a few runs of the Fairy Glen, a new river for me, and it didnt go smoothly with a deck implosion on Fairy Falls forcing me bail. We did it again the next day which went a lot better.
No photos of this, but I have made a brief video from some shots I got over the last year.
Wanderings:

Wanderings 2009 from Nick Roberts on Vimeo.

Wet West Paddle Fest 2010

I had a great time at the Wet West Paddle Fest, this was my first time to go there and I headed up with Jono and Chase
The Garry was fairly dull, but the party on saturday night was great, caught up with loads of friends and drank Slovenian wine.
The Morriston on sunday was fantastic, with a big first drop and some fun rapids, the organisers did a fantastic job with regular minibuses making it easy to do laps.
We stayed on the next day to paddle the Falls of Lora tidal waves which were at the best levels for the year and formed a really good standing wave.
Cant wait for next year!

Eurotrip - Austria,Switzerland,Slovenia

As summer rapidly came to an end an exchange of emails with Sandy Douglas led to a hastily made plan to head to Austria to try to catch the last of the meltwater in the Alps.
The plan was to first drive to Graz in the East of Austria via the slalom course in Augsburg where we would visit my friend Paula and subsequently to head west to the Austrian Alps.

Graz was the first stop, for some city surfing and sightseeing. There are two features created by the bridges in Graz, when we were there the top wave was working and the bottom feature was a tricky hole.
After leaving Graz we headed west to find some real white water. The first stop on our journey was Laussa falls, a nice 7 metre park and huck drop. All should have gone well until I narrowly avoided a swim after a deck implosion lead to me almost getting stuck at the bottom of the fall.

A few hours more driving later and the next day we found ourselves in the Oetz Valley.
The first river we paddled was the Lower Oetz, which was a dull easy wave train. Things improved dramatically with the Pitzbach, which we paddled with two Germans, a low volume technical run which started high up a beautiful valley. We also completed runs on the Upper Oetz, the Wolfs Gorge, anda fun bumpy run on the Upper Lanquart and the Venter Ache, though levels on rivers other than the Oetz could have used more water.

Sandy Cruising on the Pitzbach

After a few days in the Oetz valley Sandy had to leave and I made my way to Thun to watch the last weekend of the World Freestyle Championship, I managed to grab a sofa in the house of the Irish team thanks to Mark and joined in the last couple of nights of partying as well as getting to paddle the fantastic Weiss Leutschine with Julian and Mark, after doing laps of the waterfall at the top.
As the weekend ended I headed north to go home, I stopped at Bremgarten wave for a play. There I met a few of the guys from the British team and a plan emerged to make the journey to Slovenia to paddle the Soca river.

A combination of beautiful paddling, cheap wine, and sleeping by the river made for an awesome few days relaxation before the drive back home

Lamu - "A man without a donkey, is a donkey"

After a long time on the Nile, the urge to travel led me, Mark Leonard an Irish kayaker who is always good craic and Lizzie Fritts one of my fellow volunteer kayakers on an adventure to Lamu on the Kenyan coast in search of surf, culture and adventure.

The journey to Lamu took over 24 hours through Kenya via Nairobi and Mombasa by bus, with kayaks followed by a trip on the ferry before arriving in Lamu and renting a room.
We spent our time in Lamu looking for new surf spots, as we were as far as we knew the first people to bring kayaks to Lamu.

Dhow Trip - Photo by Lizzie Fritts

We had some success and found one excellent point break, unfortunalely I didnt get many good photos of the surf.

Lamu is one island in an archepelago off the east coast of Africa - it is originally Swahili town and still remains relatively unspoilt by tourism, the centre of the town is a maze of narrow allies and backstreets, transport around the town is by donkey and there are only two cars on the island, the town ambulance and the majors car. Outside the town we found miles of deserted beaches.

The Nile - Paddling

The first major rapid is Bujagali falls, its only a short distance downstream which means multiple laps after a day at the clinic.

Matt Roberts gets a Boda-Boda back from the Silverback section

Me, Sandy and Latif headed down for our first run of Kalagala - a game of scissor paper stone and I headed down pushing right to avoid an enormous hole.
Sunset Session on Nile Special - Photo by Mark Leonard

Good Times on the Nile

Once a week a group of us go down to Walakuba West Primary School where we run sports and arts and crafts lessons for a class of deaf children.

The fruit in Uganda, a million times better than at home. In this photo is Amina Tayona, who I have been teaching to kayak, she definately has a bright future ahead of her.

Life in Bujagali

For the last two weeks since I got to Uganda I have been living in Bujagali, Uganda, by the banks of the White Nile.

My home at the moment is a tent in the campsite is Nile Rivers Explorers campsite. When I arrived at NRE I had been expecting a packed campsite full of kayakers from all over the world. However it turns out that May is the low season and there are not a lot of people around, except when an overland truck comes through every couple of day, which always guarantees a lively night at the NRE bar.

It didn't take long to find people to get on the river with though, and I have had plenty of paddling on the White Nile. The first time I got on the river was with Nini and Erika from Norway to paddle the NRE-Silverback section of the river. It was my first proper experience of big water paddling, and very different to the rivers I've paddled in New Zealand and the UK. My first impression was that it was easier than I expected, as most of the rapids, whilst big, are fairly short and with few consequences, this was a major underestimation of the river, as I found out on Silverback, a slide into a massive wavetrain, which ripped my deck off my boat as I paddled through it. In the last two weeks I have managed to explore a lot of the river but there's still a lot of backchannels to paddle, there really is an amazing variety of rapids and I am looking forwardto finding some new lines and maybe trying some of the most famous and difficult rapids on the river, such as Itanda.

During the week I have been volunteering with Soft Power Health, they have a clinic in Bujagali, just a five minute walk away from the NRE campsite. The first thing you notice is how welcoming the Ugandan people are, walking to the clinic through the village all the children come up to you calling "Mzungu!Mzungu, How are you?" and I often end up with a crowd of children walking with me to the clinic. The clinic was set up a few years ago and employs Ugandan doctors and staff. They do fantastic work treating the local population for all kinds of diseases including malaria which seems to make up almost half of the cases, for prices they can afford, this kind of clinic didn't exist before in Bujagali and attracts people from many nearby and less nearby vilages. As a volunteer I have been based on the clinic, but also going out on outreach prograns into further villages where we sell subsidised mosquito treated bed nets and educate the people how to use them, this means going into villages where very few tourists go and really getting to know the Ugandan people.

Unloading a delivery of bed nets

Annie demonstrating the bed nets

There's also been a surprising amount going on in and around Jinja, including the Great Gorilla marathon, run on the banks of the nile from Jinja to Bujagali in baking heat and with muddy roads, I opted to marshall rather than run but did enter a 5 kilometer race which, run at the hottest part of the day and whilst I was the second place Mzungu (white person) was nowhere near some of the locals.

I have also been experiencing the local culture at a concert for the launch of "Bread and Butter"s new album in Jinja last Saturday night. After pushing our way in to what sounded like a massive party we found most of the locals sitting down appreciating the music (a mix of rap and reggae sung, horribly badly, in Ugandan, with the exception of "Say no to human sacrifice, say no to evil rituals") most of the people were drunken Mzungu's. Despite the music it turned out to be an awesome night out, and very different to anything I'd seen before in Uganda.