Feeling special is something that gives us happiness. It happens to me once in a while in the river. I’m floating in the middle of the water, it can bee the most open valley or the darkest canyon and without thinking about it, a private feeling invades me and nobody around me realises it.
Probably in an unconscious way this is one of the things that makes me like the river so much and why it has me hooked.

With kayaking you reach many places that can’t be reached in any other way. The more difficult or remote the places are the more they return to you, well, like anything else in life, the more difficult it is the more it gives back.

When you are in the middle of a river going down you are in total contact with nature, in the most changing element. You forget the feeling of floating to find your way between currents and rocks. In situations, in one of those difficult rivers, in the limit of your possibilities, you arrive to a place where the river has narrowed multiplying it strength, the inclination gives the water even more speed and the walls compress it making it immensely powerful, maybe hostile. Putting the paddle in the water is like grabbing a moving truck that has no intention of stopping. Those are moments in which instinctively you concentrate completely so as not to fail.
Moreover the river creates a special noise, it does not let you hear anything, seems it erases all around. It leaves you alone with it, seems nothing else exists. It makes you feel meaningless, it minimizes you with it strength, without asking it returns you some of the humbleness that consumerism and technology has stolen.

Later, when you arrive to the bridge or the green place where the take out is, you look back into your thoughts, the images fixed with the water strength and the noise. You realize that the river has finished, that you’ve done it, maybe a bit of a survival feeling, of success. You feel great and happy, but not forgetting the meaninglessness you felt before.

Kayaking Aoos river on the last day I had this feeling of “being special”. I didn’t feel like bringing the camera out to get a picture or to do video. I didn’t felt like talking, it was not needed, it was a memory for me, but today I’ve felt like describing it and writing about it.

I’ve kayaked 4 days in Greece, I really wanted to kayak in the Greek mountains, Greece is full of mountains(the divine Olympus is nearly 3.000 meter high). I’ve done some rivers that were not very difficult but were a lot of fun. Here is a short video, I don’t want to bore non kayakers.

As I was alone I asked for guidding to Brain Waves, the kayak company in greede. Spyros make me feel like if I was kayaking with my friends.

If it downloads slow, please click HD.

I ask myself why today I’ve decided to philosophize about the river, maybe because I´m in Greece and after so much reading about it`s philosophic past I’ve been enveloped by the idea of “wanting to know” ( as philosophers said) and I’ve wanted to explain myself as to why I like rivers.

This is how philosophy is, naked thoughts, as this trunk that one day was an elegant tree and now the river has stripped it.

I’ll soon talk to you about what I’ve seen in the rest of Greece, as I’ve already arrived to Istanbul. I’ve talked today about the rivers because about Greece I don’t know what to say, the classic philosophical past, the present crisis, the intriguing Orthodox church as we saw in Meteora, the unknown north or the Ottoman past.

I’ll decide it in a couple of days and tell you