Articles > Rafting on the Klaralven

"You'll need at least 120 logs for the raft" Stefan said, pointing to a mountain of tree trunks a short way from the river bank. "Get 40 of the heaviest down to the water, then I'll be back." And he left - leaving us to ponder darkly on the best way to murder an adventure holiday instructor. It is remarkable how we will pay out good money so that others can give us arduous, even dangerous tasks. All along the river aspirant rafters were scampering around like panicking Noahs. Men strode around with maps and a lumberjack swagger. Women stood in the water yelling "is this a clove hitch?". Children played toss the caber with logs three times their size.

According to my brochure, timber-rafting is "the most tranquil holiday that anybody has ever offered". Well hardly - but if you ignored the apocalyptic mayhem by the riverbank everything else was indeed jeeringly peaceful. Varmland is Sweden's most southerly wilderness, a province as big as Wales but with less than 300,000 inhabitants. Two-thirds of it is forest, a vast timber-yard sprinkled with over 3,000 lakes and innumerable red and white stugor, the remote wooden summerhouses that are as important to Scandinavian life as the pub is to our own. Through the heart of this prosperous pleasure-park flows the Klaralven, a placid, matronly river that rises north of the Norwegian border and meanders south in increasingly bountiful curves till it enters the oceanic Lake Vanern.

Logs have been floated down the Klaralven since the 1830s and building rafts from them was a traditional form of hitch-hiking. These days the logs go by road, but organised rafting continues down a 60 mile stretch of the river. The emphasis is on a character-forming, confidence-building voyage - in other words you graft for your raft. These are surprisingly large - about 10ft by 20ft - and take around six hours to build. Constructed solely from a dozen ropes and three layers of ten-foot logs, they leave the water just inches below the top. Instructors, usually young students on holiday, offer help, advice and 'you'll soon find out' smiles.

In spite of my inability to master the clove hitch (there are at least 40 to do), I was proud of our completed raft. Lashed tight with veridian green ropes it could have been a piece of conceptual art in the Tate, though by the end of the week it looked more like a soggy heap of Twiglets. It even floated, and when we set off in the evening sun everything seemed dreamily easy. The Klaralven flows at just over a mile an hour so a raft just drifts along like a leaf spinning idly down a gutter. At least it did for the first night, which we spent like innocents lost in the forest, gently cart-wheeling beneath the stars.

From then on our holiday diary reads like an episode from a children's adventure book. 'Overhanging trees cleared away the breakfast. Still can't figure out how to stop. Stuck on rapids for an hour then got caught in a smelly whirlpool for ages...' Six time-warped days of languid holiday punctuated by sudden adventure, lived to our own weird raft-clock and the whim of the fickle goddess Klaralven. 'Still haven't caught a fish but my knots are holding tight. Got lost in the mist (scary!) so decided to eat the meatballs. Eventually spent the night marooned in a stagnant backwater, then awoke at dawn to the whirr of strafing mozzies.'

For all this harum-scarum, the presiding mood is one of sitting and drifting, of tranquillity. Timber-rafting is certainly the best way to see Varmland, which viewed from the air or road seems little more than a repetitive blanket of undulating pines. Floating down the Klaralven gives you time to enjoy the serenity within these forests, to live at the river's pace, marvel at the caprices of Swedish weather. Summers here are like our own: unpredictable, broody, capable of both wrath and glory. Half an hour after searing sunshine will come a torrential storm complete with thunder, lightning and rainbow - "The best bit!" a gleeful German raftess exclaimed to me later. In the whole of my trip I never saw one unhappy face.

As the days pass you learn to respect the river (you've no choice), to reads its waters, recognise the distinctive sound, loud as a belly flop, of a beaver smacking its tail on the water to warn its brethren there are mad English rafters ahoy. Your raft is like an open-air living room - you can walk around, cook, sleep, dream. Every morning we'd stop to wash in the river, anoint the night's mosquito bites, cook breakfast on our floating barbecue. Every evening there'd be a bewitching hour as the sun set: fish jumped, beavers dived, stray logs drifted in pink waters. Then it was time for brandies and insect repellent, to find a place ashore to camp and sleep like - well - logs.

There was even time to go inland, to scramble up the bank to inspect the affluent villages that line the Klaralven. In medieval times pilgrims travelled up this valley on their way to Trondheim - waterside settlements like Norra Ny and Eskharad still contain relics from these days in their immaculately-kept stave churches. Their graveyards are packed with elaborate wrought iron crosses from the 18th century, a legacy of Varmland's other great sources of wealth, mining and metal-working.

Bitten and sunburnt, unshaven and craving alcohol, the Klaralven's rafting crews present an incongruous sight as they maraud through the Toytown neatness of the Swedish countryside. A few days on the river puts people in an anarchic, swashbuckling mood reflected in their de rigueur floating apparel: wrapped-round-the-head T-shirt, sunglasses and a hunting knife tucked into the bermudas. We found ourselves involved in bizarre, intimate affairs - conducted entirely by binoculars - with these fellow pirates as our rafts passed and re-passed each other. Drifting along, the existential silence would suddenly be interrupted by a sniffy murmur: "You know what... They've built a sun-deck on theirs."

Rafting particularly appeals to the Germans, Dutch and Danish who come, often as families with surprisingly young children, to fulfil the very Nordic passion for 'being in the nature'. While they had taut tarpaulins, coiled ropes and First Aid velcroed to the mast, our raft gamely favoured the punk, Just William approach: a wig-wam of useless poles, a crucifix of washing - given a tatty black flag and a dog on a string it could have been part of some waterborne anarchists’ convoy. Still it was our raft, and once we had learned how to navigate, we did with it as we pleased - which is just what timber-rafting is all about.

As the Klaralven weaves south it grows more slothful and portly as each bend passes. Ox-bow lakes seduce you off course, Treasure Islands lurk in mid-stream, the shore gets an awful long way away. In mid-summer the water drops so low that you have to spend a lot of your holiday punting and paddling through the shallows. 'Three hours stuck on a sandbank, two in the doldrums...' we dutifully recorded. Jolly canoeists whizzed by with 'enjoying it?' grins, abandoned raft-wrecks appeared ominously atop sandy islands. Fortunately we were now seasoned river pilots, able to negotiate a course through the Klaralven's assorted log-jams, cesspools and submerged power cables. This rapidly-acquired, self-taught skill is somewhat essential, for to arrive back at base camp you have to tack across the river's mighty flow - the alternative is to carry on into a hydro-electric power station and emerge, as Stefan put it bluntly, "inside a light bulb".

Adventure holiday etiquette demands that such expeditions always end in a deadpan, matter-of-fact way. "We're back!" you exclaim. "Good. Please wash up your kitchen equipment" is the likely response. Back-slapping, jubilation, soil-kissing and prayers of thanksgiving are definitely not on. Modest self-satisfaction and an after-dinner Swedish rafting yarn told two years later are probably OK. For me satisfaction came when we undid all our cowboy clove hitches and pushed our borrowed logs back out into the river. Our raft floated away reluctantly, slowly drifting into the evening mist like a funeral pyre. Over the next few days it would spin lazily down to the Skoghall sawmills, and the following morning emerge as milk cartons.

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