Confessions in a Life Jacket: Whitewater Rafting on the Kali Gandaki River

Listen, I’m not saying my daughters tried to drown me.

But I’m also not not saying it. You know?

Now, before you get all judgmental and call Child Protective Services in reverse, just hear me out.

I’m not angry. I’m not pointing fingers. I’m just a man who got thrown out of a raft in the middle of a raging Nepali river while his beloved children stared at him like he was a mildly interesting rock formation.

This isn’t a legal deposition. It’s more of a . . . therapeutic processing moment.

Because what happened on the Kali Gandaki River was not just a whitewater mishap.

It was justice.

Cosmic justice.

Because a few months earlier, in a small incident I’ve been legally advised to refer to only as "The Taj Mahal Situation," I may have made some . . . choices. Choices that involved sprinting past my family at sunrise to get the shot.

And now, here I was—gasping for air, clinging to the side of a raft, and being calmly observed by my own offspring as I bobbed in a glacial river like a bloated tourist-flavored dumpling.

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On the Kali Gandaki

Here’s what happened:

We were rafting the Kali Gandaki River in Nepal. Three days. Big water. Big views. Big adventure. Everything was going great—until it wasn’t.

We hit this rapid—huge standing wave. One of those waves that looks like it's trying to punch through the sky. The raft surged upward. I watched the riverbank fall away below us we were so high. And then the raft, just a breath away from achieving true flight, plummeted back down like it suddenly remembered gravity was a real thing.

And I was gone.

Just like that. First I was in the air. Then I was in water. Splash. Gone.

Thrown out of the raft like yesterday’s chapati.

I surfaced. Cold. Gasping. Mostly full of adrenaline, and partially full of river. I found the raft. I clung to the side like a man who’d actually listened during the safety briefing. Because that’s what they told us to do: don’t panic, don’t flail—just grab the raft and the people inside will pull you in.

It’s a good system. Solid plan. Real team-oriented.

I reached the raft. I saw my daughters. They saw me. We locked eyes.

And then . . . nothing.

No outstretched hands. No urgent scramble to hoist me up. No dramatic cinematic rescue moment with slow-motion splashes and triumphant music. Just . . . eye contact.

To their credit, they didn’t scream. Or laugh. They weren’t texting. They didn’t try to sell my seat to someone else. They just looked at me—calm, steady, slightly confused—like I was maybe the rafting equivalent of a deer on the side of the road. Interesting. Slightly out of place. But definitely not their problem.

I hung there. Awkwardly. Water slapping my face. Legs flailing in class III existentialism.

Eventually, the guide pulled me in. Professionally. Efficiently. Not a word spoken. Just a wet man, a river, and the quiet realization that maybe, just maybe, this was karma.

Because here’s the thing: a couple months earlier, at the Taj Mahal, I may have . . . let’s say . . . prioritized my sunrise photo over my family. Allegedly, I may have sprinted ahead. I may have left them at the gate. I may have gotten the shot.

Allegedly!

And maybe... this was the universe evening the score.

I abandoned them in Agra.

They left me in that river.

Do I blame them?

No.

They’re my daughters. I’m their dad. I rescue them. They’re not programmed to fish me out of rivers. They’re programmed to ask for snacks and roll their eyes when I explain things like Life, the Universe, and Everything to them (the book, not the cosmos).

Could they have pulled me in? Yes. We practiced that. We rehearsed it. We even laughed about it on shore.

Did they? No.

And that’s fine.

It really is.

Because travel teaches us things. About beauty. About connection. About the cold indifference of Himalayan water when your children make direct eye contact and decide to let you marinate for a minute.

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Nuts and Bolts: Whitewater Rafting on the Kali Gandaki

We named daughter 2 with an atlas in our lap. So, her name is a combination of the Kali Gandaki River, and the Ellora Caves. And that meant our trip to the subcontinent hit all her namesakes.

Of course, we had go whitewater rafting on the Kali Gandaki River.

Daughter 2 ready to embark on a trip on her namesake river

We booked a 3-day, 2-night rafting trip at a tourist office in Pokhara, Nepal. The cost (this was 2016) was $184US per person. That included transportation, equipment, food . . . basically everything.

We camped on the riverbank in the evenings. The food was surprisingly good.

Riverside camping

The rapids are class III/IV. The only class IV rapids we hit (and they were really more like the high end of class III, truth be told) occurred on the first day. The third day had very few rapids and entailed a lot of paddling to make forward progress.

The company we went with took safety seriously, including a safety kayaker who followed us through rapids in case someone needed help.

The river cuts through the Kali Gandaki Gorge, which may be the deepest gorge in the world. The scenery was nice, but not the same thing you get trekking in the high Himalaya.

If you are an adrenaline junkie, there are certainly more intense rivers you can run from Pokhara, or Kathmandu. But the Kali Gandaki has just enough whitewater to be interesting but not particularly scary. Perfect for families or people with limited whitewater experience.

Several other members of our party besides me were tossed from the raft at some point, but riding out the rapids in the river was fairly casual. It would be even easier if your daughters actually save you.