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| :-) Looks quite scary, right? It was scary. And a bit of fun as well. I fell out of the boat twice. My first fall is captured on the video we have from the event. I was a star. The second fall was a big one - most of the boat emptied then. Including the guide. Albert haven't fallen once. The guys which are falling out on the second picture fell out three times. Here is how our day looked like: 6:00 AM - Wake-up call. I got ready and went for breakfast really quickly. Nobody else was having breakfast yet and thay didn't have the warm stuff out yet, but I was really impressed with their choice of tropical fruits. 6:30 AM - A small "Raging Thunder" bus picks us up from the hotel. We pick-up some more people on te way to their main building. Once we're there, we switch to the bigger bus. There was a lot of japanese people on that bus. 7:15 AM - We were all off to go rafting on the Tully River. They show us instructional video on the bus. 8:30 AM - Arrival to the small town, where the Raging Thunder has it's small facility with the bathrooms and some expensive breakfast food. People change to their swim suits and T-shirts and soon we are on the bus again going to the rafting site. 9:15 AM - Here we are. Not alone, there is another bus from a competeng company with a lot of people on as well. We pick-up our helmets, life jackets, Albert rented a pair of sneakers for the water experience and I just used my own poor pair of sneakers. 9:30 AM - We are boarding the boats. Our boat number is 32 and guide's name is Trevor. And I experience my first touch with the water - it's cold! The boat had holes on the bottom (intentionally), so that the water can empty itself quickly after it rushes in. I should probably say something about the place we were at. Basically, we were in the middle of the rain forest - I found a nice picture of the landscape on the Raging Thunder website. The rafting we were about to do was grade 4 rapids. In Raging Thunder words: "Moderate technical rapids - as for Grade 3 with definite continuous need to manoeuvre rafts. Exciting rafting." 11:30 AM - Stop for the BBQ lunch and neverending toilet line. 12:00 noon - Back on the water. 3:00 PM - Drying off and changing to dry clothes in the forest. Boarding the bus, off to the cafe. 4:45 PM - We've got some sandwiches to eat and they showed us the first half of the video from the day. I was the star of the video, because my first fall looked very awful on the camera. 5:15 PM - And we are on our way back to Cairns. They showed us this video of the "best" falls and situations on the river. They're very clever that they don't show this as their promotional video - nobody would go rafting then. I feel completely exhausted. 8:00 PM - We tried to treat ourselves with beautiful dinner. We went o this special place with australian gourment meals. Albert had cangaroo and I had emu. Both meals were excellent, but we both had a heat stroke or something like that. Our heads spinning, feeling weird (naturally high)... So I couldn't eat much - tried to drink a lot ... and went to bed quite early. |