Spring Break Saga: Chapter 3 Sweet

After we picked Alix up from the hospital we drove a few hours to our hostel for the night. We got in at 1am and we all disperse into our rooms, no partying or socializing for us tonight everyone was exhausted. The majority of the group stayed in this one hostel and since we were sitting at the back of the bus and got the room list last, we had to stay in the hostel across the street. We lucked out! This place wasn't the nicest, but it has clean towels and soap! (this was amazing because the last three days we have been using our wet beach towels as our shower towels as well...gross!) Apparently the place that everyone else stayed at was nasty! lucky us.

The next morning at 5am we were up to go white water rafting, something I was most scared of doing! We were going to try and get out of it, but that wasn't an option. We were nervous because I have a family friend who almost drowned doing this in Australia! So we listened closely to the safety instructions, double checked our life vests and pretended to look excited. We all got helmets, life jackets, a paddle, and a pair of Crocs! Our raft guide was nicked named the Ginger Ninja but his real name was Joe,He was tall and skinny and very soft spoken, he had long red hair in a ponytail and a long red beard that was braided.

We did a flood run because the Tully River was flooded recently. A flood run is when you do the bottom part of the rapids first and then go to the top and do the top half second (sometimes if its too bad you do the bottom half twice) Tully River is in the middle of the rain forest and is on the World Heritage List, it really was a beautiful place(to bad I didn't get to take in too much of the scenery, I was too busy clingy to the boat with all my might) We learned some basic instructions like"to the left" "to the right" these meant for us all to slide over to the left or the right side of the raft (this is difficult for me since I'm not so sharp on my left and rights, embarrassing, I know) We also learned "Get Down" and "Hold On" Get down was the call for us to pull in our paddles and get in the raft and hold on was meant for us just to hold on to the sides of the raft but still be ready to paddle. Our raft was nick names Team Get Down. This is because no matter what call he gave us when it came to any mildly big rapid we all jumped into the raft! I found it funny that we would paddle a bit and then Joe would tell us to relax as in stop paddling, this was funny choice of words because we would never relax, we were terrified!

Oh yeah did I mention that this was a grade 4 rapids out of a scale of 6! Each rapid we named something different, like Shark Fin, Spiral, and Hells Gate. My friend Jen fell out of the raft twice and one time was particular scary. We just went off a ledge aka a mini waterfall and Jen falls out. We are stuck at the bottom of this rapid and the water is forcing her under and dumping into the raft, were trying to pull her out but the force of the water on her is making it too difficult! We are all freakin! But we managed to get her into the raft and she was fine, a bit embarrassed because as we were pulling her up she lost her shorts shoes and paddle. She was funny about it she didn't want to be saved out of the water because her bathing suit bottoms were falling down, she rather drown than moon her fellow rafters. But everything from then on was smooth rafting (that's an oxymoron)

A couple times in the day we got out of the raft and floated down the river and the also got to do a bit of cliff jumping (they were really just tall rocks) but they were pretty high and kinda scary! I got up to the top of one and decided it was too high for me to jump and was trying to back out, and the instructor up there (a crazy Canadian) pushed me off...glad I did it tho! Oh yeah! also we were asking Joe about the river and if there was anything in there that would eat us, and he told us no. Then at the end of the day he told us that there actually Salt Water Crocs in the first part of the rapid we did, we also went swimming there! SCARY!

We went back to their headquarters had a beer and some food and got a good laugh at the pictures that were being snapped of us at different points down the river. We got back on the bus to head for Cairns, our final stop. We all passed out immediately on the bus, we were bumped bruised and tired. Glad I did it though.

So I apologize for the lack of pictures, none of us were stupid enough to bring our camera, Andrea however brought a waterproof disposable camera but it hasn't been developed yet. I will post them as soon as I get them!