Almost everybody who rafts in Rishikesh does it for a couple of hours and goes for lunch. There is a fourth thing that never appears on a rate card, because it is not a day trip at all: seventy kilometres of the Ganga, from Devprayag down to Rishikesh, over three days, sleeping on the river between them.
Where it starts, and why that is the point
Devprayag is the confluence: the Bhagirathi comes down from Gangotri, the Alaknanda comes down from the other side, and below the point where they meet the river is called the Ganga for the first time. You get on the water there. Everything you have read about Rishikesh — the aarti, the bridges, the ghats — is seventy kilometres downstream of where your first day begins.
That is the difference between this and a rafting trip. You are not visiting a river for an afternoon. You are travelling down one, and arriving in the town the way the water does.
The three days
The shape is consistent across the operators who run it, give or take a camp:
| Day | On the water | Night |
|---|---|---|
| One | Devprayag to Kaudiyala. The gentlest day — open water, a few good rapids, time to swim and to learn the raft | Camp at Kaudiyala |
| Two | Kaudiyala to Shivpuri. The big one. The Wall, Three Blind Mice, Daniel’s Dip, Return to Sender — Grade III and IV, one after another | Camp at Shivpuri |
| Three | Shivpuri to Rishikesh. The famous 16 km everybody else pays for as their whole trip, run as your last morning | Home |
Twenty-odd named rapids across the three days, from playful Grade II up to Grade IV. If those names mean nothing to you, the guide to the four day-stretches explains what a grade actually feels like from inside a raft.
The camping is not an add-on
People book this for the rapids and talk afterwards about the evenings. You camp on the sand at the river’s edge, a long way from a road, with no signal and nothing scheduled. Dinner is cooked where you are sitting. It gets dark early in the gorge and genuinely cold by the water even in warm months, and the sound does not stop all night.
Two hours of rafting is something you did in Rishikesh. Three days is somewhere you went.
When it runs, and when it absolutely does not
Roughly October to late June. Through the monsoon — July to mid-September — the river is too high and the hill roads carry a real landslide risk, and this run stops entirely rather than being run carefully. Right after the monsoon clears is the strongest stretch of the year for it.
It also cannot be booked on the morning, the way a two-hour raft can. Small numbers, specific dates, permits and camps that have to be held — pick your travel window and ask early rather than hoping.
Who this is not for
Be honest with yourself about this one, because there is no exit halfway down a gorge. You need to be comfortable in moving water and able to swim — not a strong swimmer necessarily, but not frightened of going in, because on Grade IV people do go in. Operators set age limits for this that are stricter than for a day trip, and some set an upper limit as well as a lower one, so confirm them before you build three days around it rather than finding out at the put-in.
Skip it if you have heart, blood pressure, asthma or epilepsy concerns, or if you are pregnant. And if you have never rafted at all, do the 16 km from Shivpuri first. It is the same water you would run on your final morning, and one afternoon tells you more about whether you want three days of this than any article can.
How we handle it
This is not inside any of our trips and we are not going to pretend otherwise. It is arranged on request: tell us your dates, and we come back with whether it is running, which operator we would put you with and what it costs — before you owe anything. If the water or the season is wrong for the days you have, we say so instead of taking the booking.
