Sukute Beach and the Balephi

We left the Pokhara region and, via a night back in Kathmandu, made our way over to Sukute village and the river-beach resort of the same name.

Our bus from Kathmandu took us directly to the put-in of the Balephi River, our last river in the self-support section of the trip. The Balephi is a real treat, a departure from big-volume Nepal as the style is much more familiar to UK paddlers such as ourselves. The group described it as a ‘whitewater playground’ and we had a superb time dodging rocks, curling waves, making moves in and out of eddies, and generally having fun. It is excellent class 3/3+ all the way down from where we put in (a village I didn’t catch the name of) and we paddled out into the Sun Kosi river as the sun was going down.

A short section of the Sun Kosi follows with some bigger volume waves and we sighted a troop of monkeys enjoying the last of the sun from their perch on top of the river-side rocks. This caused the invention of a new river-signal (hand signals used to communicate when speech won’t carry over the sound of whitewater) of the hands-under-the-armpits monkey motion. I’m not sure anyone else in the group got what I was on about but they did all spot the monkeys anyway!

It was a fantastic end to our self-supported rivers as we pulled our kayaks up the beach at the resort. A night of local food and a couple of well deserved beers followed before heading back to Kathmandu to meet up with the group for the Karnali trip!