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Think of a river. Make it huge, more than a mile wide in places, with low clouds of thunder-mist drifting above its plunging rapids and waterfalls. I’m not talking about just any old river here. No sir, this is the ancient Nile, a roaring, bucking, wide and tugging liquid snake surging from its source in Uganda and then forging its way through the Great African Rift Valley. After hundreds of kilometres, it leaves the green highlands of East Africa behind to carve a great swathe through the arid wastes of Sudan and Egypt, eventually gushing into the warm waters of the Mediterranean at Alexandria. When you stand next to this river, you feel like a character from a Hemingway novel. All around sweeping stretches of tropical forests cascade down to the water’s edge, where open-billed storks wade and crocodile lurk. Hardwood giants and jackfruit trees loom up from the river, festooned in liana creepers sparkling in all shades of jade when the high equator sun burns through the morning cloud. When you listen, you’ll hear the haunting call of fish eagle and piercing cries of malachite kingfisher above the menacing rumble of Bujagali Falls. And when you look at the inflatable rafts on which you will shortly launch into the tug and swirl of the mighty Nile, you will feel your staccato heart beating away inside your chest. And you will know one thing for sure. You are way too young to deal with death by drowning. But it is too late to chicken out now. We’re all geared up and halfway through the safety briefing at the put-in point a few hundred metres below the Owen Falls dam, grouped around a raft known as The Big Rubber. Eight life-jacketed souls listening attentively to a Nile River Explorers guide rattling off an alarming list of things that could go wrong if we don’t get our fingers out of our arses right away. One more run through the emergency procedures and then we launch, first practising our theory in the safety of the flat-water section below the dam wall. | 
