Calm in rough waters

Travel company founder Sachin Bhatia is a devotee of river rafting.

Rafting is not merely a sport, it's a way of life at MakeMyTrip.com. The walls of the leading online travel agency's spanking new office in Gurgaon are full of happy pictures of "" you guessed right! "" rafting trips. "All our company offsites are rafting," says Sachin Bhatia, founder and chief marketing officer. Even the company's CEO, Deep Kalra, is a rafting enthusiast.

No wonder the orientation sessions for the company's latest Holiday Plus promotions were held at rafting camps.

It isn't as if Bhatia or Kalra were rafting enthusiasts and carried their passion into the office. It also doesn't have to do with the company being in the travel business.

"It was sometime in 2005 when we had a rafting offsite at the Aquaterra camp near Rishikesh," Bhatia recalls. "It was a small trip, and we went down the Ganga on the easy Kodiala-Rishikesh stretch. But we were hooked."

Besides the official trips on the water, Bhatia has been making time "" a week, two weeks "" every year to indulge his new-found love for the adventure sport. Of these, the most memorable was the trip down the upper Brahmaputra, or the Siang as it is known in Arunachal Pradesh.

"It was the first commercial descent down that stretch and was, thus, sufficiently high-profile. There was Miditech filming the expedition and a flag-off by the chief minister of Assam."

A two-week long affair, the trip, says Bhatia, took him to the back of beyond "" a ferry ride from Dibrugarh to Pasighat in Arunachal and from there, through dense forest and inhospitable terrain to Tuting, the start-off point.

As for the river, Bhatia says, it was placid most of the way, except for some huge breakers "" many rising as high as 20-25 feet.

It may have been exhilarating, but this was also the trip where Bhatia suffered his worst rafting injury to date. "The banks of the Siang have a very fine sand that's almost white in colour. The CM's helicopter had parked there for the flag-off and as it was taking off, the whirring of its blades created a whirlstorm in its wake. We were in the water and our raft overturned. We were thrown into the river, and my leg got stuck between two boulders."

It was painful, but with army escort boats around, Bhatia had access to medical aid. Needless to say, he continued with the expedition.

Bhatia, however, is quite definite that rafting is not as dangerous as it appears. "It's tougher crossing the highway. At worst, the raft overturns and you climb up," he says. Anyway, it isn't the thrill of courting danger that appeals to Bhatia.

"I take enough precautions." He keeps reasonably fit, follows the instructions of the navigator, has learnt to respect the unpredictability of all rivers, and is careful to drink purified water at all times.

For Bhatia, rafting's appeal is in the opportunity it gives him to get far from the madding crowd... and the cellphone. He values the camaraderie that grows between men (and women) thrown together who know that they must work together to survive, and the chance to get to know the great outdoors in a way that he wouldn't otherwise have.

"During the Arunachal trip, we came across a tribe which still hunts with poison arrows. We went into one of their homes and I remember one of the women showed me an oar that she had saved from an earlier expedition mounted by a foreign group [it wasn't successful]."

Over the years, Bhatia has rafted on a number of rivers all over India (no, he hasn't ventured abroad and does not particularly want to, because the rivers of India, he feels, hold challenges enough for him).

Besides the Ganga and two of its tributaries, the Alaknanda and Bhagirathi, he's forded the Sutlej and the Tons in Himachal Pradesh. By now, he knows fairly well how to read a river although "it'll be a long time before I can be a navigator".

Of these trips, Bhatia found the one on the Zanskar, which began at a place called Rangdum, a two-day drive through some unusually beautiful country near Kargil, the most memorable.

"We were passing through a gorge that would probably be a week's trek from the top to reach. The quality of light was so incredible that even my amateur attempts at photography have come out beautifully."

This interest in photography is an offshoot of rafting that Bhatia is now seriously thinking of developing, as he is trekking. The other thing that he's recently started is mapping the remote places he's been to on Google Earth.

If Bhatia has any grouse, it is that rafting is not something that he can involve his family in, which is limiting because he can't go out as often as he'd like without feeling guilty about depriving them of his time.

His wife's accompanied him once, but Bhatia has been taking his children along to camp at Rishikesh so he gets to see them whenever he camps for the day. "They are familiar with all the technicalities of rafting," says the proud father.