Published in FHM Bionic, December 2001

Better than a fat stripper

Africa's rugged terrain is the ideal place for a legendary stag weekend – with a final fling off the top of a cliff. By William Ham Bevan

YOU'RE getting married. The fateful day is still weeks away, and already you’re tearing your fringe out at the endless organisational fuss.

Pink or cornflower blue for the bridesmaids? What filling for the obligatory vol-au-vents? And can Uncle Jeffrey be trusted not to tell that joke about the Irish gynaecologist? Only one beacon of light remains – your last 48 hours of unemasculated freedom. The stag weekend.

Unfortunately, your final moments as a bachelor can all too easily become a lager-dampened squib. At best, you end up with a morning after that lasts the whole week, and at worst, the prospect of waking up in Aberdeen station with your knackers painted mauve and superglued to a bench.

Instead, you could really be experiencing the greatest, most exciting, most overtly masculine weekend humanly possible: an adrenaline sports weekend at Victoria Falls in south-east Africa.
Of course, even the most dutiful best man isn’t going to jet across two continents to do a recce. That’s where we come in, with FHM Bionic’s cut-out-and-keep, repent-at-leisure guide to the ultimate stag weekend – and not an anatomically correct inflatable sheep in sight.

With this in mind, I find myself standing on the bridge that soars 110m above the Batoka Gorge, linking the countries of Zambia and Zimbabwe, and feel like I’ve walked onto the set of The Incredible Shrinking Man. To the right, massive plumes of spray hang in the air, as the deafening falls live up to their local name of Mosi oa Tunya – “the smoke that thunders”.

Below, tiny kayaks plough through the rapids, looking like plastic novelties from the bottom of a Frosties packet. A raft crashes through and flips onto its back, shedding six tiny orange-lifejacketed figures into the Zambezi. It takes several seconds for their screams to reach us.

As I turn to walk on, a bungee-jumper plunges from the bridge, limbs flailing like a wind-up bathtime frog. But there’s no time to gawp: my mission is to cram as many extreme and downright foolhardy activities as I can into the space of one weekend. I think I’ve come to the right place.
We travel to the Zambezi Swing on the Zambia side of the gorge for a day of cliff activities. Without much ado, I proceed to the abseil. Harnessed and helmeted, I volunteer to make the first descent, and bounce confidently down the sheer cliff in what seems like next to no time.

But my rising cockiness is short-lived - the rap jumping is a different matter. This form of high-speed abseiling was developed by the SAS, ostensibly so they could look even harder when storming embassies on live TV. It involves turning around to face the ground, harnessed by the back, and then enacting a swift hop-skip-jump manoeuvre down the cliff face.

Lowering myself out of the small hut at the top brings the day’s first real hit of adrenaline. Without my spectacles, I strain to focus on the assistant holding the rope more than 50 metres below, and freeze. At length, I manage to shakily feed the rope through the figure-of-eight and take a few tentative steps downward. Too easy.

With a yell of “Banzai!” I take an ill-judged leap toward the rising canyon floor. In a second, I have lost all contact with the cliff face, and find myself spinning around on the end of the rope, as useless as a hanging basket, cursing my overconfidence.

We climb back up the canyon to have a shot at the high wire. I am clipped by a pulley to the horizontal cable, and instructed to sprint along the runway and launch myself into the gorge. Just like that. Not for the first time in my life, I do as I’m told and take a running jump.

There is another heart-in-the-throat moment as my harness takes up the slack and my trajectory dips down, but the view from the middle of the wire – right down the rugged gorge to the mighty Zambezi – really knocks the air out of my lungs.

It’s not physically challenging, though, until the instructor reverses the harness so that I can launch off forwards in the classic “Superman” pose. As soon as I leap off, the harness bites into my arse, and I soar through the air with one hand frantically trying to relieve the weight on my poor hindquarters. No wonder Superman wore an extra pair of pants outside his tights.

After a light lunch, it’s time to get harnessed up for the main event: the gorge swing. The rope I’ll be hooked up to is slightly short of 60 metres long, and attached to a high wire that spans the gorge.

When I step off the cliff, this will translate into a trouser-filling three-and-a-half seconds in freefall, before (God willing) I become a living demonstration of the laws of physics, and the taut rope yanks me away from danger – propelling me skyward at a speed of over 90 mph. When the swing kicks in, I will be barely a metre above the rocks.

“Forward, backward or Death Drop?” one of the assistants asks politely. This last option involves an instructor lowering you backwards on the rope to the horizontal, and then letting go, producing a reasonable facsimile of an abseiling accident.

I opt to step off the platform forward. He shows me the position to take: rope clasped hand-over-hand, tightly to my chest. I realise it’s the same pose of helpless supplication that Obi-Wan Kenobi adopts in Star Wars as he allows Darth Vader to strike him down. Although I have only a rope in place of a light sabre, I think I get some idea of how the old Jedi was feeling at that moment.

The assistant – fastened securely to a safety line – makes a final check, and it’s showtime. “Don’t look down,” he smiles. Instinctively, I look down, and discover he was right. “Okay, one, two, three, GO!”

Stepping off the top of a cliff is the most counter-intuitive thing you can ever do. However much you might attempt to percolate catchlines like “totally safe”, “two harnesses” and “100 per cent safety record” around your brain, every cell screams out that this is suicide by any other name.

Yet incredibly, I find myself hopping forward. In terms of an adrenaline rush, the effect of freefall is like poking the foot of a thermometer into boiling oil. A wave of sweat shoots up from my feet to the crown of my head, as gravity does its worst to teach me a lesson or two.

I shut my eyes as the ground rockets up toward me, and then in what seems like barely a millisecond, a massive force yanks my universe into reverse, and I’m soaring up toward the far wall of the canyon. By the time I settle into a gentle figure-of-eight pendulum around the gully, I’m shivering with total exhilaration.

Back at our lodge, the River Club, I show my gratitude to the river gods for my deliverance by drinking too much. The lodge is the eccentric creation of ex-British Army officer Peter Jones. Evenings usually mean relaxed drinks on the verandah and a cordon-bleu dinner in the elegant dining room, with the possibility of moonlit croquet later on. Tonight, however, I mumble my excuses and totter back to the thatched, wood-and-rattan gazebo where I’ve been billeted.

Our last blast of excessive stimulation involves white-water rafting. The next morning, I find myself on the Zambezi in an inflatable craft with six strangers, our Aussie guide, Mozza, and a hangover the size of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

After strapping on lifejackets and helmets, and watching a demonstration of basic rafting techniques (the most important command turns out to be “get down”) it’s off into the first rapid, the “Boiling Pot”. The trick is to aim for the far wall of the gorge and “high side” - shift all the weight to one side of the raft to prevent it from flipping over.

Evidently we don’t get the racing line quite right, as the raft ricochets off the rock wall and straight into a three-foot wall of foam, which swats us into the soupy water like pieces of flotsam. Flotsam, however, shares its derivation with the verb “float”, and this is exactly what doesn’t happen next. I flail around underwater, trying to break the surface, but soon realise that I have no idea which way is up. There’s no safety rope here.

Total panic sets in, and just as I start to visualise a special black-edged edition of FHM Bionic hitting the news-stands, I suddenly shoot into daylight, and greedily gulp down some air. We flip the craft back over, Mozza plucks us out of the drink by our lapels, and we sit, dripping and goldfish-eyed for a few seconds. “We got through, team!” he shouts. “Team celebration!” We dredge up a few limp cheers .

On the positive side, a dunk in the Zambezi is a far more effective hangover cure than the usual two Alka-Seltzer dissolved in a Bloody Mary. Only 21 more rapids to be negotiated before hometime.

The day is a strange mix: total serenity as we float through the beautiful scenery of the Batoka Gorge, punctuated by short blasts of high-adrenaline lunacy. At one point, an evil-looking crocodile observes us from the bank; disappointingly, it is a Ronnie Corbett of the reptile world, at about two feet long. “Wonder where its mother is,” one of the rafters muses.

By three o’clock, after several more spills, I’m bilging out Zambezi water from every orifice. “Nearly there, mate,” says Mozza. “Only a few gentle rapids coming up to round the day off.” I ask him what the next one is called. “Oblivion,” he grins. But by the time we power through the surf to aim for terra firma, we feel invincible. Mozza’s orders for a celebration after each rapid have become cause for much whooping, screaming and waving of oars.

The euphoria subsides as we face the 40-minute climb out of the gorge. When a team of local porters sprint down the hillside, and then pass us again on the way back up, we feel yet more inadequate.

It takes the next day’s helicopter trip over Victoria Falls to put the incredible terrain we’ve taken on over the last few days in any sort of real perspective. It’s been a weekend that’s seen moments of utter, utter terror in the most stunning surroundings I’m able to imagine: something I'll never experience again, except perhaps on my own wedding night...