Today was devoted to white-water rafting, something Josh had
never done, and Joyce and I had only done once many years ago. It was amazing.
We began by taking our van to the headquarters (?) of the
rafting company, not a place to engender confidence, but they were highly
recommended. There we changed to their
vehicle, sort of a four-wheel drive truck cum passenger compartment.
On our way our rafting guide made crickets
from the local grasses:
We stopped along the road and picked and tasted fresh lemon
grass and cinnamon bark. The mountains
are very beautiful, and we climbed for an hour up along the river valley:
We were missing some necessaries—water shoes for Josh and,
highly recommended, sunglass holders to keep our glasses on our necks when the
force of the water swept them off of our faces.
We stopped at a market along the way and bought fake $6 Crocs for Josh
and shoelaces to tie on our sunglasses:
Finally we got to the takeoff point, and were fitted with
life vests and helmets:
I had my camera in a plastic bag and took photos through the
bag of the first, very mild rapids and the stopping point for a swim:
After this, however, the guide strongly recommended that I
give him the camera to put in his “dry bag” and was he ever right! We went seven miles downstream through
multiple level 2 and level 3 rapids.
These were amazingly strong and made for great excitement! Our group had two rafts, and three people
fell out of the other raft, but we all stayed in ours, although we were soaked for
the whole seven miles. There were two
kayakers with cameras in dry bags traveling with us, and they went ahead and took photos of us from the
riverbank at places where the current and rapids were especially strong. I have a CD of photos they then sold us, but I have no
way to transfer photos from the CD to this blog at this time. We stopped along the way at a beautiful
waterfall, and I did take the camera out and took these:
Tomorrow we leave for the cloud forest. More then.
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