Although I started writing trip reports ever since I was about fifteen years old, they were about camping and back-packing trips with the scouts. I started to write them to help myself to look back and re-experience the events that had happened. For me it's almost as if the experience is played back like a kind of real-life movie. All I do is write down what I "see" back from memory. That memory is rather selective, but it I get the impression from my friends' remarks that it's usually pretty rich in detail.

After I started posting my trip reports on the Rec.Boats.Paddle newsgroup, some people pointed out to me that they were comparatively long. Well, since I'm "comparatively long" myself, at a little over 2 metres (~6'8" for the metrically challenged), I started to call them "Wilko Sized" trip reports. Putting that in the subject line of my posts helped the long trip report haters to filter out my trip report posts. As a nice side-effect, after a while it also became a kind of "trade mark" term on Rec.Boats.Paddle.

Besides the many one day trip reports, I have written several long trip reports that span periods of a couple of days to several weeks. Not all of them will be fun to read (Example: The trip report about the weeks I spend in the U.S. after my friend Scott Bristow died). Like I said, I write them primarily for myself, in the second place to share my experiences with a select group of friends, and if someone else enjoys them, that's a nice bonus.

I added a couple of trip reports written by friends about their experience of paddling with me. They tend to give another view at trips that I posted the reports about on this site.

Note: I tend to write things as I see them, which may be from a different point of view than that of other participants of that particular trip. That goes for feelings but also for the relative difficulty of the rapids and rivers that I describe.

I hope that you'll enjoy my trip reports! If you have any remarks or questions with regard to these trip reports, please send me an e-mail. My e-mail address can be found on the first page of my website.

Wilko van den Bergh

May 16, 2001