Ye Olde White Water

We are still getting over the awesomeness of our vacation. It was so great to see Katie, as the last time I saw her was 4 years back when we drove across the country from Seattle to New York City in a minivan (I had one of those awesome drive-someone-else's-car gigs). It was also sweet to see Anne and Tim both not comprehend her strong Birminghamese while I caught 99% of it.

More could be said about the white water rafting, however. Firstly, we went out of our way the first day we arrived in the beautiful, hilly, laid-back Kingdom of Swaziland (that place rocks!) to go by the Swazi Trails office and inquire about stuff such as, is this rafting-without-experience deal legit? The lady there acted like I was so stupid I felt fairly confident when I left that it would not be, say, life threatening.

I guess it wasn't, but this was my first experience with adventure sports, and likely it will be my last. I'm not against a roller coaster, but I don't need to pay someone a bunch of money to scare the shit out of myself. I'm getting on in years enough that really bad traffic gets my heart racing, and yet I maintain enough youthful imagination to be terrified in the dark of monsters, etc.

Anyway, we show up, and drive south through the country, which was mystifying as part of the previous day's visit to Swazi Trails had also been about our eagerness to head north after the river rafting, but whatever. Like I said before, I got my heart going with following the rafting van through mountainous terrain in our wee Yaris, so I got a thrill before we got to the spot.

There was a brief presentation and then we all boarded rafts, with helmets and life vests, and played around in the water. Tim didn't seem particularly talented at steering, but it would be hard to tell in 5 minutes if he was, which was how long we had before the whole rafting experience began in earnest.

The fact that "white water rafting" is a kind of verb (okay, a noun referring to a verb, whatever), or maybe it's just those rose-tinted glasses I keep on wearing, inclined me to imagine us mostly on rafts doing things. This was not the case. Mostly we just sat on rocks while the instructors told us how to do something scary that we didn't know how to do, which was go down a rapid, and then all do it, raft by raft, waiting to see how many of us failed.

During the presentation I asked, "are we all going to fall out of our rafts?" because that seemed to be a theme of the instructor. He said it would be boring if we didn't, which was kind of a nice thing to say, when you think of it. However, after weeks of rain the water level was high and it seemed to be inevitable.

Tim and I were thrilled after the first couple capsized to make it down the first rapid. After that, it became apparent we hadn't mastered the basics, though, and after some leisurely rafting we split up with Anne and Katie. The other couple there mentioned that they do not call it a "divorce raft" for nothing, but it just seemed clear to us that Anne and Katie were getting on better with the experience, even if it was just psychological (I wanted to quit after seeing the very first raft capsize on the very first rapid).

However, the next rapid would get us all. They referred in the presentation to you being in a washing machine with 10-feet walls of water on each side of you, and how you want to remain in the fetal position but upright, with your feet downstream, once you capsize, should you not manage to hold on to the raft or oars. We all took that to heart, even though we had no idea at that time that the whole experience would revolve around capsizing. Anyway, I had to watch and know that Tim and Anne had capsized while Katie and I waited on and on for like half an hour. That was unnerving. Then it was our turn. According to Tim and Anne, who got to watch us capsize from close-up, we did the exact same thing: As we approached the rapid, the raft turned around so that we were backward. With no instructions provided on what to do in that situation, we just kinda sat there getting an adrenaline rush until we capsized, big time, and then were in the washing machine of 10-foot walls of waves, hoping to survive. Once we got out of the worst of it, choking down gallons of poopy brown river water, there were our instructors, yelling at us to swim, which none of us immediately thought to do, given the previous instructions.

Mere kilometers away from where our cars were, 6 out of 8 of us opted to walk the final, obviously horrific, rapid, which capsized the 2 clearly talented novices who had managed to safely navigate the first 2 novice-unfriendly rapids.

It was exciting, and slightly before and after you are afraid of drowning in the rapid you feel quite thrilled, but I didn't exactly anticipate that this was what white water rafting was about.

So it was a great trip, and I'm definitely glad we did it, although I can't imagine us doing it again! Now we are back at work, which is nice in many ways! Turns out we like where we live, our daily routines, our coworkers and counterparts and supervisors, and have lots of good ideas to keep on going. It's hard to complain...about more than Swazi Trails!