It started to rain heavily in the fading light. Before long the downpour had drowned the fire, the last steam and smoke cocktail drifted through the heavy forest and the roar of the river grew louder. Sleep that night was fitful as the sound of the river grew almost deafening. Whole trees and ancient hardwood logs were swept downstream at a terrifying pace and exploded against the rock walls of the canyons. New Zealand’s Motu river was notorious for vicious flooding and these trees had been captured from its banks further upstream.

We waited for three days before daring to continue our journey downstream. We had made our rafts ourselves from discarded inner tubes, stout bamboo poles and baling twine. The huge rapids in the gorges were enough but we certainly couldn’t compete with the giant trees that cart-wheeled off the bottom of the river in their death throes. Even after three days, the Motu was still angry. We found ourselves pitched into giant brown holes in the river and washed into immense grey walls. I thought that the dirty brown darkness beneath the surface of the Motu would be the last thing I would ever see.

Since our first river journey a quarter of a century ago, we have gone on to lead rafting expeditions on every continent in the world except Antarctica – many of those were first descents. We have shivered on the banks of the Indus River in northern Pakistan after flipping in the glacier fed waters, our rafts have been stoned by bandits in the gorges of Ethiopia’s Blue Nile and we slid off a glacier to start our first descent of the Muk-su River in Tajikistan.

One raft survived the bite of an angry hippo on Ethiopia’s Omo river and another was lost on Chile’s Bio Bio river. We have been surrounded by hundreds of dugouts in DR Congo’s Tshuapa river, run the first high-water trips on the Zambezi river in 1986 and posed for cameras on homemade ‘plot’ rafts on the Beleya River in the Caucasus mountains of Russia. No other rafting company in the world has our depth of experience and outright passion for adventure. Despite our adventures elsewhere, the Nile holds a special attraction. Ten years ago a startled hippo leapt from a rock island mid-stream in the roaring Nile in Murchison Falls National Park. His first-ever sighting of a raft created an impressive splash of water in the quiet pool he called home. Towering hardwood trees, heavily burdened by the loads of vines they shoulder hang low

over the river, dark brown waters swirl menacingly beneath their shadows and huge leviathans bask on dark bedrock islands. The only hint of what lies downstream in each rapid is a wisp of spray drifting skyward in the colours of the rainbow.

Aggressive crocodile charges became daily occurrences and we counted over 1500 hippos in what became the first-ever descent of the Victoria Nile. BBC News and the Daily Telegraph talked of closing the final chapter on the exploration of the Nile but we talked of the beginning of a new era. In August 1996, following our successful first-descent of the Nile, Adrift introduced commercial rafting to Uganda and it has since become the country’s most popular tourist activity. Over 90% of our staff are now Ugandan and, despite what people believe, after the Bujagali Dam is constructed, rafting on the Nile will continue to be world class and remain an icon for tourism in Uganda.