White water rafting Part II

Hey, so part II of our rafting adventures:

Just before lunch we successfully navigated a rapid (yay!  This was rare!) and our guide offered that we could 'surf' it if we wanted.  This involved paddling upstream until your boat was under the waterfall which would a) sometimes get you stuck there, b) get you all very wet (see the facebook photos if you doubt this...  It's the ones where most of the boat is submerged) and c) potentially - if badly managed - flip your boat. 

Ok, so being smart cookies, you can all see what is coming now, right? 

Yes, we paddled on in and the force of the water caught us, pushing the front of the boat under (where I was, incidentally.  Who needs to breath, right??).  The force of the water then pushed our boat sideways, so the left side was being pushed under by the pummelling of the water.  Our guide yelled to lean right, so we all transferred our weight to the right side of the boat.  But it was too little too late.  The force of the water flipped the whole boat over, spilling everyone into the broiling water. 

My big fear with white water rafting had always been to get tipped out and come up under the boat.  Now, though, I was strangely calm.  Perhaps it was because I had the most experience out of everyone on our boat (most were newbies.  Jeff was very rude about some of the paddling!!) or perhaps it was because of the millions of times in my childhood that I had been told how to survive a rip.  As I came up I realised I was under Alex, who had been at the front of the boat with me, and above her I felt the boat.  Instead of fighting for the surface and ending up under the boat (which a number of people did), I let the current take me further downstream until I popped up by one of the other boats, who fished me out.  I was noticeably the only one who travelled that far downstream before being put back in a boat.  Something which didn't really concern me, decked out as I was in my sexy mustard fleece, wetsuit with holes in the crotch, battered-looking helmet and 'Happy Raft' logoed lifejacket.  Come on, when you're kitted out like that you can take on the world!! 

So, by this point we had all definitively earnt our lunch break (and, more importantly, our toilet break!!) and we enjoyed the opportunity to eat chicken and salad bagels, drink warm tea and queue for the smelly portaloos! 

After lunch, we were refreshed, recharged and ready to go.  If a little more cautious-feeling than in the morning... 

The afternoon was pretty similar to the morning - you know, a river, boats, water and rocks to get stuck on.  And stuck on rocks we got.  Again and again.  Finally, we were approaching another rapid, when we took a wrong angle and glanced off a rock on the side.  This deflected us into another rock, which sent us ricochetting into a large low-lying rock in the centre of the rapid.  Time slowed down as we were stuck at the top of the rapid, the water slowly pivotting the boat until, as we faced backwards, the water pushed us free and down the rapid. 

A novel way to do the rapids...

As we fell, the front of the boat flicked up, sending Sarah and I caterpaulting out.  As Sarah went, she fell across Jeff, bending his oar across his knee.  In case you can't picture this, here is the mean action shot (if you look at this picture on facebook you will find that I am tagged in the white water to the right of the boat):



Sarah - yellow helmet - bending Jeff's paddle as she falls across him - black helmet.  I am long gone...

After bumping off a few rocks I popped up close to our boat and with a couple of swim strokes was able to hang on.  I went down a few smaller drops hanging on to the outside of the boat, with Jeff trying to haul me in and me trying to not get hauled in for fear of getting squished between an underwater rock and the boat.  I figured I was safer doing my own thing, amply protected by my lifejacket, wetsuit and helmet.  However, the guides were bellowing at Jeff to get me in, so despite my protesting, Jeff grabbed me by the lifejacket and dragged me into the boat.  Just in time to go down the last large drop on that run of rapids, with Jeff lying on the bottom of the boat and me hunkered down, spider-like over him, trying to hang onto any ropes I could reach. 

As we pulled over at the bottom, I was protesting that I was fine and that I didn't see the danger in letting me stay outside the boat until we reached a calm bit.  However, as I was explaining this, other boats were negotiating the rapids.  We heard a shout of alarm - a small Japanese girl had fallen out of her raft.  As we watched, she was rushed by the water, just ahead of the boat.  There was a few metres of clear water, then the brunt of the current pushed the river into a big rounded stone, sticking a metre or two out of the water.  We watched in open-mouthed horror as the current pushed her towards the stone, the boat only a foot or so behind her.  With centimetres to spare her guide managed to hook onto her lifejacket and pull her into the boat, only seconds before the boat would have slammed her against the rock. 

"Oh," I said.  "That's what can go wrong..."

If you are a concerned or attentive person, you may be wondering by now what happened to Sarah while my lovely husband (the only one capable of pulling people into the boat properly) was busy saving me.  When I first managed to reach the boat, Sarah had been a couple of metres behind me.  I tried to grap onto a paddle, hoping she would grab the other end, but we were both too dazed to manage that.  As the boat and I were swept further away, another boat threw a safety rope out to Sarah, so they could haul her to safety.  As she was getting towed back in, congratulating herself on remembering how to grab the safety rope correctly, she glanced upstream in time to see her oar coming straight for her, and the hard end smack straight into her forehead.  BAD LUCK!!  The good news is Sarah's lump on her forehead was the worst of the injuries and we were able to put our boat back together with everyone in one piece. 

After this, we managed to stay in the boat except for when we chose to get out to swim or leap off big rocks (ok, in my case, get pushed off big rocks because I was too wussy to jump!  I was hoping the people below wouldn't hear me ask the guide to push me, but when I climbed back into the boat Jeff was pissing himself laughing at me!!  Bugger!).  In fact, once we got all the big rapids out the way, our guide even got up the confidence to put us in some crazy positions going down the rapids. 

The most notable of these would have been when Alex, Jeff and I were kneeling at the front, top halves hanging over the front of the boat.  My heart was in my mouth when we got caught on a rock (you never would have picked that, right??) and the boat started leaning downwards on an angle, making my head the closest thing to the water.  By that point I was cold and tired and stiff and really didn't feel up to another crazy fall.  If the boat flipped, my head would be the first thing under, so God knows how many people I would have had land on me. Luckily, we got free of the rock and rode the rapids up the right way, landing with everyone in the boat. 

We then did rapids standing up in the boat, lying sideways in the boat, and facing backwards (one of the scarier ones, as I could see the tension in our guide's face!  Note: Sorry if I told you about that one already in Part I, I left too long between these!).  Some of the other boats offloaded so their occupants could go down some rapids without the boat, but by that point the people in our raft were looking cold and exhausted.  There is only so much adrenaline you can take in one day!!

Later, sipping hot tea in dry clothes, I was chatting to one of the guys from a different boat.  He confessed to being a little jealous of us, saying his guide was so competant it made everything look easy.  They had told him the big rapid was 'nothing', but as they watched our boat approach, bouncing off rocks and getting stuck at the top of the waterfall, his guide said 'It's not nothing if you do it like that!' and winced as we slithered down, losing two occupants.  "Your boat looked more exciting!" he said.  Yes, that was a very accurate observation.  Terrifying, heart-attack-inducing, exhausting, exciting... same diff, right?

Cheers,
Charly

P.S.  Sarah says she had a good time, but I doubt she will ever go rafting again.