The longest river in the world begins as a stream in a cloud forest on the hills of Rwanda. It is hard to believe, standing later at the wide delta in Egypt, but the water that after thousands of kilometres flows into the Mediterranean first runs down from the marshes and mists of the Nyungwe Forest, at nearly two and a half thousand metres. In 1993 a group of kayakers from Kraków came there to paddle the very beginning of the Nile.
Where the Nile begins
The most distant source of the Nile is now taken to be the Rukarara stream, which rises in the Nyungwe Forest in western Rwanda. From there the water flows in turn as the Mwogo and the Nyabarongo, then as the Kagera, the largest tributary of Lake Victoria; and only out of that lake does it flow as the White Nile and set off north across half of Africa. This is an entirely different river from the Blue Nile, whose source lies in Ethiopia; the two meet only at Khartoum.
For centuries geographers argued about where the Nile really begins. Only the expeditions of 2005–2006, using GPS receivers, pointed to the Nyabarongo and Kagera river system in Rwanda as the most distant source. When the Poles reached the place in 1993, though, the question was still open. The Kagera and Nyabarongo region was already considered the most likely beginning of the Nile, but there was as yet no widely accepted confirmation. So they paddled a river whose beginning was still a matter of scientific debate.
A hundred kilometres of first descent
The expedition's greatest achievement was the first descent in history of about a hundred kilometres of the Rukarara. In the world of whitewater kayaking such a feat is called a first descent, and it is one of the most valued achievements there is. It means that no one has run the river before. There are no descriptions, no photographs and no hints left by predecessors. Every kilometre is discovered on your own, and the answer to what waits beyond the next bend is learned only once you get there.
Three countries, three rivers
The expedition did not end in Rwanda. Its members also reached Uganda, where they paddled the rapids below Owen Falls, at the point where the White Nile leaves Lake Victoria and begins its course across Africa. Later they moved on to Kenya, where they were the first to run the upper stretch of the Tana, the country's longest river, which flows into the Indian Ocean. In the course of a single expedition they explored rivers in three countries and made two first documented descents.
In search of unknown rivers
The Nile was another link in the chain of expeditions by Kraków's Bystrze. The same club ran the Colca canyon in Peru in 1981, paddled the rivers of Australia in 1990, and twenty years after the Nile, in 2013, ran the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. The expedition to the source of the Nile, like many others, was filmed by one of its members, Łukasz Pająk, the same man who two decades later was on the Colorado team. It is largely thanks to such records that the memory of these descents survived at all, because little was said about them at home.
The year before the catastrophe
The Poles paddled in Rwanda in 1993, in a country calm on the surface but in reality on the edge of an abyss. A few months later, in the spring of 1994, a genocide took place there in which about a million people died in a hundred days. The same rivers, the Nyabarongo and the Kagera, then carried the bodies of the victims down to Lake Victoria. The kayakers ran the source of the greatest of Africa's rivers just before its beginning became one of the images of that crime.
What was left after the expedition is a thing that seems small yet is truly rare: a record of the first descent of the stream from which the Nile begins, made by people who came there for one reason only, to paddle where no one had paddled before.