Trinidad Guardian
By Faine Richards
Nightfall was fast approaching. The rising river and raging currents stood between them and home. They had no choice but to cross.
Seventy hikers experienced this nightmare on Sunday evening, after trekking to the Guanapo Waterfall.
Two hikers, Marcus Smith and Aiyana Baksh, 20, were swept away by the treacherous waters.
Smith, 22, was found dead hours later. Baksh was yet to be found up to late yesterday.
Numb with disbelief, hiker Ryan Marcano spent his waking hours yesterday reliving the horror scene in his mind.
“It felt like something out of a movie,” Marcano, 20, a third-year student at University of the West Indies (UWI), St Augustine.
“Nobody thought the whole river was going to overflow,” Marcano recalled. “Everyone was moving slow (down the mountain). People were walking at different paces. The river was not choppy at that point.”
Unaware that rising waters had already began making their way downstream, some members of the hiking party lagged, he said.
Marcano, who walked ahead with some of his friends, waited on the river bank for stragglers to catch up.
“That’s when the water level started to rise,” Marcano said. “After that, the water got really choppy.”
He said even if we tried to put our feet in, it would have pulled you away,” Marcano said.
With the help of a fallen tree, the hikers began making their way slowly across the surging waters. The first two groups crossed successfully.
“We saw one lady get swept away in the river first, and a fellah jumped in to get her. He pulled her out okay,” he said.
Marcus Smith, 22, the hiker who was swept away by the perilous waters and subsequently found dead, stayed at the back of the hiking party to assist his girlfriend, Aiyana Baksh.
“Aiyana couldn’t keep up, so he (Marcus) stayed back to help her,” said Marcano, a friend of Smith since their Form One days in Fatima College.
“It was her first hike.”
Advised by hike organisers, Hike Seekers, to bring life jackets in the event of inclement weather, Marcano said Baksh had obtained a life jacket and was wearing it as the hikers trekked downstream.
“She didn’t know how to swim. “Marcus was afraid of the water,” he said.
As the currents intensified, Smith, Baksh and other hikers got trapped on the other side of the river. Suddenly, Marcano and his compatriots saw Baksh and Smith being sucked downstream.
“He was grabbing at her life jacket because she alone had one,” Marcano said.
“He was mostly holding onto her. The current dragged them down. That was the last we saw of them.”
The image of his two friends struggling against the raging currents was haunting, Marcano said.
“I am happy that I am alive, but I still wish I could have done something to help my friends.”
©2005-2006 Trinidad Publishing Company Limited
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