Dinant Evasion: What happens when you combine a log flume, bumper cars, 7000 kayakers, and a sinking kayak on the River Lesse in Belgium.

The magical town of Dinant, on the Lesse River in southern Belgium. The kayaking route does not take you past here, so make sure to include a visit to the city in your itinerary! Photo by Rob.

​Before you read this post, I want you to know that Dinant and the surrounding areas are really lovely - I've visited twice and had some great biking and hiking experiences. But kayaking was a different flavor, and I feel it should be documented as a warning to any kayakers thinking about paddling here...

As we passed under the big welcome signs at Dinant Evasion, I couldn't help but feel like I was entering an amusement park. We obediently zigzagged through the queue lines to one of the (many) ticket offices. "Do you have your confirmation letter?" asked the ticket lady in broken Dutch (Dinant is in the French-speaking part of Belgium). I fumbled for my phone, hoping the confirmation email was still cached (I still use my US smartphone, so no cellular data for me). Phew, there it was. I've never arrived for a reserved kayak rental and been told that my last name was insufficient for accessing the reservation... Warning Sign #1. Okay, the super commercial website could also have tipped me off (Warning Sign #0)... 

The welcome sign at Dinant Evasion.

I read her the confirmation number and she handed Rob and I each two paper tickets and directed us up the hill to the bus stop. We could chose a 12 (left) or 21-km (right) paddle, and we headed right. Here we stood in another line of people, many with outfits and hairstyles appropriate for a day of shopping in Brussels rather then a 5-hour paddle in the Belgian "wilderness"  (Warning Sign #2). At the end of the line, we dutifully presented one of our tickets and were packed onto the next bus like sardines. We spent the 20 minute ride to the launch in Houyet people watching. Dinant Evasion has an arrangement allowing them use public transit buses, which get little use on weekends. 

Picking which bus to ride...

​Upon arrival, we were herded into a line for yet another ticket booth. It was during this wait that we were startled by the first of Dinant Evasion's many contraptions for mass production kayaking. We were surrounded by rows and rows of massive metal structures holding ~28 kayaks each. The shear volume of kayaks was impressive on its own. BUT then we saw the retrofitted forklift grab hold of a tower, lift it off the ground, and rotate it 360 degrees, dumping water out of 28 kayaks in one fell swoop (see video below). As someone who spent 9 years of my life dragging, washing, and drying rental kayaks by hand, and building excellent character in the process, this surprised and irked me. Maybe this is how people feel when they lose their jobs to "improvements in technology," or maybe it feels like an attack on the quiet, unhurried Art of Kayaking. I guess these are not mutually exclusive. Warning Sign #3.

​Once I shook myself out of this stupor, we exchanged our second ticket for plastic buckets (the Belgian version of dry bags) and a "light" paddle. Apparently if you don't pay the extra 3 euros for a "fancy" paddle, you get a wooden stick with two metal plates bolted on the end. They do look awfully vintage/cool, and I secretly hoped we would be granted one of these because good story. But I'd inadvertently signed up for a package which included the "good" (i.e. heavy plastic) paddles. 

The non-"light" paddles

​I laughed when we were handed yet another ticket and herded into the final* queue (Warning Sign #4). In this line we had to sort ourselves into queues based on boat type: single, double, triple, and something else (canoe? sit-on-top? I can't remember). We shuffled to the front of the empty single kayak line where we discovered the next contraption: the log flume! Basically, if you're trying to launch 7000** people in one morning, you basically have to be throwing people into the water. And throw they did. But before I allowed myself to be swept away, I made this little video for you (they were quite annoyed by the hold-up):

​​*Little did we know that the entire 5 hour trip would be a queue...
** We made 2 estimates of the number of people on the water. One was based on eyeballing the number of kayaks in frames and one was based on watching kayakers go by and converting the rate to a total. The range was 700 to 7000 (or something like this). As engineers, we were satisfied to having pinned down an order of magnitude. 

​Anyways, this wasn't my first rodeo with interesting European kayak launches (see one here and here), so let's continue. I felt relieved to finally be on the water. We were in the first group of paddlers of the morning. As would be expected from Warning Signs 0-4, the trip began surrounded by novice kayakers yelling, colliding, and rotating their kayaks perfectly perpendicular to the direction of flow. We started by paddling at a clip and weaving our way to the front of the group. After about 15 minutes, we reached a gap in the crowd and enjoyed what would become our only moment of peace for the day. I snapped some shots, deceptively void of other paddlers:

Rob in his patched up kayak.

​We paused to take survey of our kayaks. They were baby blue and built with extremely thick fiberglass with more patches than my grandmother sewed on my little brothers' cargo pants in the 90s. Which is to say, they were tattered. A quick scan of the surrounding kayakers confirmed that we had pulled the short straw - all the other boats were new-ish plastic boats. Rob drew the shortest straw, because about 30 minutes into the trip he noticed the water level rising in the cockpit. Soon, he was sitting in a puddle. Initially I showed how he could adjust his drip rings to keep the water out, but it didn't take long for us to discover the loose fiberglass flap underneath his seat, allowing water to seep continuously into the boat. We stopped along the side of the river and Rob made his first attempt to empty his kayak. As luck would have it, the entire seam connecting the bottom of the boat to the top was riddled with holes, making it easy(ier***) to empty:

​*** Okay it was still REALLY hard and heavy. 

Water draining out of the seam of Rob's kayak - handy!

Pro-tip: a water bottle makes a good bailing device because the flexible plastic conforms to the flat (or varying curvature) bottom of your kayak. 

Developing a bailing device for Rob's sinking kayak on the fly. Photo by Rob.

About 1.5 hours into the paddle, my desire for a coffee and the need to empty Rob's boat again led us to make our greatest mistake: stopping at a riverside cafe. We landed on the rocky beach at a camground along the river and headed up to the restaurant. 

​We sat at the cafe, drank a coffee, and ate our lunch. As we watched the river, the frequency and chaos (e.g. random capsizing for no reason) of passing kayaks increased rapidly, and the gravity of the situation began to set in. We had lost our lead, and we were now destined to become part with the masses. As more kayaks piled up on the beach for their lunch break, we fleetingly considered hijacking a couple non-ancient boats (no one would ever catch us), but we chose the more adventuresome option: continue in the sinking vessels. 

​There were some cool things about this paddle, and had we not been surrounded by loud, splashing, crashing paddlers, it would have been easier to settle into enjoying them. We passed Chateau de Walzin and some beautiful rock features. At the Chateau we hopped out of our boats (okay, scrambled up a steep muddy bank past no trespassing signs) to get a better picture. A couple people followed our lead, leaving their kayaks floating in the river (not tied off). We once again considered abducting their kayaks, but took the high road.

We paddled over two small dams, and enjoyed the beautiful weather.

Chateau de Walzin

Castle selfie! Photo by Rob (obviously).

Approaching one of the two little dams we had to kayak over.

​We continued along, trying to chat while being intercepted by rogue kayakers and avoiding collisions. The river was shallow in many places, and left no part of our hulls unscraped. When the river bend took us past our campground, we hopped out on our private beach to dry some clothes, bask in the sun, and wait for the peak kayak flux to pass. 

Our campsite. This photo was taken in the morning, before the deluge of kayakers.

Taking a break from kayaking and watching the insanity on the river. Photo by Rob.

Random picture of the cool farmhouse building at the campsite that's home to the restaurant/bar and shop.

​About an hour later, the flow of kayakers still showed no signs of stopping, and a bunch of paddlers had decided to copy us and take a break on our now-crowded little beach. It was time to move out. We paddled the last 3 kilometers to the take-out just upstream of downtown Dinant. Here we witnessed two more of Dinant Evasion's mass-kayaking systems. The first involved lowering the giant kayak racks completely into the water, where rental associates glided the boats into the slots. Once the top row was filled, the crane would lift the rack up a notch, and the next row would be filled. Finally, the full rack was lifted, dripping, onto a truck, where it was immediately driven back to the start point:

The crane loading up a freshly-packed grid of kayaks to return to the launch site.

​The second was a giant washing station for the dry-buckets. It wasn't that crazy, but still surprising that they had an entire room and industrial washing machine dedicated to this purpose:

A room dedicated to washing plastic buckets.

​After paddling in Durbuy earlier this summer, I thought I'd experienced the pinnacle of commercial kayaking. But Belgium continues to surprise me, and boy was I wrong! I picked Dinant as our destination because it's a beautiful town and home to two of the few kayak rentals in the region. Kayak rentals in southern Belgium seem to be limited to the calmer portions of two rivers: the Ourthe and the Lesse. There are other paddling opportunities in the upper reaches and tributaries of these rivers, but they require having your own boat or being a member of a kayaking club. I guess this is understandable given the risks associated with whitewater kayaking, but it seems like there is an untapped opportunity for creating a (small!) whitewater kayaking school of sorts. In retrospect, however, I'm not sure that many of the paddlers we saw last weekend would be interested. Most of them seemed fully satisfied with playing bumper kayaks and yelling at the top of their lungs. 

If all this sounds fun to you, then by all means, go kayaking in Dinant! But you won't find me there again any time soon... Am I crazy for thinking this level of commercialization of kayaking is excessive? Or have you had similar experiences in other places? 

Another kayaking shop had fewer kayaks; but still enough to make me take a picture...

BlueBike (Belgian public transit bikes) was our main form of transportation for the weekend. Here we're headed back to the train station on Sunday. Photo by Rob.

Date: Saturday, September 3rd, 2016
Distance: 19.2 km (12 miles)
Duration: 5 hours
Weather: Warm and sunny!