Trip to Smoky Mountains – July 2004

Last weekend was American Independence day long weekend. We had 3 days off and we planned a trip to Smoky Mountains. Smoky Mountains is located on the border of South Tennessee and North Carolina.

 

We started early morning on Saturday, 3rd July in a 2004 Nissan Altima. It was a 380 mile journey. We comfortably covered around 365 miles in 5 hours. The last 15 miles took us 2 hours. To top it all me and my friend Suneel had made the hotel arrangements and both of us forgot the name of the hotel we had booked. As hard as we tried to recollect, success kept eluding us. We thought there would be a few hotels in the area and decided to ask each of them if we were booked with them. As we approached within half a mile of our destination we saw at least a hundred hotels, motels and inns. Not kidding. Suneel had the hotel reservation confirmation in his mailbox and we frantically tried reaching people who could access Internet and look up the name for us. Finally after calling 15 - 20 of our friends we could find one who could help, and finally we crash landed into Howard Johnson Inn.

 

Next we had some lunch substitute and set out to roam Gatlinburg. First we visited the office from where we had booking for our Rafting Adventure for Sunday. We took the maps, filled out forms and were eagerly awaiting our turn to raft.

 

The night I slept dreaming about the rafting adventure and I was feeling almost wet. The wait was over when the dawn broke and we hopped in our cars. We had to travel 40 miles before we reached the river. It was an extremely scenic route up and down the wonderful range of smoky mountains. There were deep valleys or dense forest on one side and steep mountains on the other side. I enjoyed driving so much that I could have had a higher Job Satisfaction Index than Micheal Schumacher.

 

Next we were in rafting gear, in the raft and ready to go. It was a beautiful morning, the temperature was a pleasant 70F and the waters of river Nanthala were cascading at rapid speed making a nice rhythmic sound.  I closed my eyes to capture and treasure the moments for a lifetime. It was so beautiful. Finally, we began rafting. It was my first rafting experience. As we came more and more downstream in the raft, the water currents started getting more and more rapid. The rapidness of these water currents is what is used to describe the level of difficulty in rafting. The higher the level, the higher is the risk. We had Level 2 and Level 3 in our course. Level 5 and beyond have high chances of fatality.

 



In high spirits as we started our adventure



We crossed all the Level 2 currents and enjoyed them thoroughly and there was this last Level 3 before we would finish. As we fast approached this last rapid, we were in high spirits. Just then on one of the turns there, our raft hit a rock on the right side. All the folks on the right side fell on people on the left side. 

 

Where am I?



 Just then a HUGE current of water hit the raft hard and me and Venky were thrown in the water. I still remember the split second when that powerful jet of water splashed with a thud on my chest. The impact was so great that it lifted my feet up in air for a second or two. I was neither in the raft nor in the waters that time. I was suspended in mid-air. I fell in water and hit the rocks 6-8 feet below me, thanks to life jacket I resurfaced quickly. 

 

Nose-and-toes-out



For some time I was unable to breathe and that made me panic. When I resurfaced, I saw Venky floating next to me. Next I looked at the raft and saw that other 4 of my colleagues were safe and in the raft.



The safe-4



My instantaneous reaction was to try and swim. Before I could stroke even one arm, the water current used to throw me 5 - 10 feet. It was impossible to swim. By this time I had stabilized and the panic was all gone. I knew I had to get across to the right shore even though left shore was more closer because the stream was moving to the right. Venky is a big man and thought he could force his way to the left shore and he almost made it before the shore eluded him and he was thrown midstream. I knew my physical capabilities and and went straightaway towards the right shore. I could comfortably breathe now and my only task was to steer towards the shore. However doing that backwards was more tougher than I thought. They instruct you to float with Nose-and-toes-outside position when you fall in water. What that position does is, it gives you a comfortable position to breathe and prevents your legs from being stuck in the rocks because now they are pointing skywards.  

Now it was difficult to have a sense of direction, so what I did was take a breath -- look behind for rocks on my way and paddle towards the shore. Repeated this for a almost 3-4 min. In between, there were other rafters who tried to come close and rescue me. One raft came within 6 inches of me before currents forced it other way. I guess at that moment I understood what it means to "reach out to people" (pun intended). In that short span of 3-4 min trailers of so many movies flashed in front of my eyes. When I missed that outstretched hand by 6 inches, I remembered Stallone of Cliffhanger. The water was freaking cold at 42F/ 5C and I remembered Titanic and so many more ...

 

Finally I managed to come close to the shore and one of the rafts reached me and pulled me towards the shore. In the mean while it had started to rain torrential, almost a minute after we had fallen in the water. The rain drops were hurting. When I reached the shore my teeth were clattering out of cold, but I was feeling glorious. My whole body was numb for a while and I realized I had bruised knees and a cut left palm. People congratulated me on reaching the shore and told me that I did a good job at keeping cool and doing the right thing.

 

In the meanwhile Venky was still going downstream very rapidly. I could see, understand and feel what he was going through. For a moment when I saw him still in the middle of the stream, my heart sunk. We were getting afraid since the Level 5 course was just probably a couple of thousand feet ahead and he was heading in that direction. Luckily for him he hung tightly to a rock and people on the shore threw ropes at him like a rodeo. He grabbed one and was pulled out. The ordeal was over for Venky. After he came to senses, even he felt jubilant and thrilled.

 

At the end of it, it was me and Venky who enjoyed an array of emotions like excitement, fear, panic, thrill, jubilation, happiness and relief and over the next 30 minutes we successfully managed to convert others' feeling of pity for us into jealousy. Wow it was fun.

Phew !. This was only one day. The second day we went to Gatlinburg and had some more adventure sports, most notably ice skating and alpine rides. Will describe that some other time