Journeys down the white water

Sunday 1/9/05

Daily stats:
No. of pies consumed to date: 5
No. of pictures taken: ~1150
No. of hot New Zealanders spotted: 0

I’ve lost count of the number of days we’ve been here. So I’ll stick with just dates from now on.

We go through the same routine as yesterday for getting up: 5 alarm clocks go off in random order, and everyone fights the urge to stay asleep for another 10 minutes. Some were successful. A lot of us went out the night before, some longer than others, and we’re all pretty tired. Someone wakes up and accuses another (names withheld) of pissing out the window when they came back last night.

Today, we have a shuttle picking us up, so we can’t dilly-dally around too much. Apparently we will be making a breakfast stop too, so we don’t have to do the mad dash down to the local café for some more pies.

The trip over is uneventful, if not a little hazy as we spend most of it waking up. We’re delivered at the staging area for the rafting place, and lo and behold: more wetsuits. I figure that from now on, if I see a wetsuit, it means we’re going to be doing something fun. I won’t be disappointed.

RASTAKIWI: I put on my cool act, remembering my wet suit size from yesterday, but nobody seems impressed. The registration guy deserves a mention: he’s what could be classified as a RastaKiwi, a half-baked mix between Rastafarian and New Zealander. He is slightly odifierous, and it’s apparent his dreads haven’t been washed in weeks. He was probably high while we were talking to him, but with these types, you can never quite tell if they’re high or not since they’ve smoked so much. A large tattoo of what I think is the outline of New Zealand covers his left calf. Needless to say, this guy is quite cool in the Jimi Hendrix sense of cool, and makes for easy conversation.

SUIT UP: The wetsuits are similar to the day before, except no jacket this time. Instead, they hand us these fleeces which appear to be the last thing I would wear in the water. One of the rafting guys comments on it’s a miracle what you can do with recycled milk bottles. Looking closely at the fleece, I notice that in fact, while it feels like a standard cotton fleece, it is in fact plastic. It basically won’t wick up water and is more or less water proof. Brilliant!

We meet our raft guide, Nick, after suiting up. Your typical charismatic Kiwi, he seems a little less boisterous than the others we’ve met but has an air of confidence about him that is comforting. We have no idea what we’re in for on the river, just that we’re going rafting.

As we get to the river, we learn that today, we will be tackling class 4 and 5 rapids on the river. For reference, rapids only go up to class 6. And to think we’ll be taking a boat of beginners down this river, I suddenly become slightly concerned. Nick better be damn good!

THE RIVER: This river in itself is special as it was dammed up several years ago for power generation. Originally, it was going to be running at just a trickle, saving the flow for the power generation up stream. As it turns out, the rafting industry is a fairly powerful lobby in New Zealand, and they protested the drying up of this river. They eventually negotiated that the dam would open up 28 days each year (basically on the weekends in the summer), for recreational purposes.

There are 8 of us in the raft, with Nick and another guide-in-training in front, with myself and 5 others from the study abroad group taking up the rear. Somehow I end up in the back of the raft, which apparently gets the most action as far as getting flung out and getting wet. Lucky me.

After a quick lesson in commands to expect from Nick, we set off down the river. There are 3 other rafts in our group and some crazy guy hitting up the rapids in a canoe. It turns out that this guy is one of the best rafting guides in the area. After watching him navigate some rapids, I believe it. I can’t sit in still water in a canoe without capsizing it.

START OFF STRONG: We start off strong with a class 4 rapid to get our blood going. We are the last in the group to go, so we get to watch the other three rafts make it down one by one. The first raft isn’t very lucky—they end up going down the rapids sideways, and the last thing I see is one of the occupants getting jettisoned from the raft as it capsizes down the rapids. Our guide scurries off to help pull people out of the water, and we get a little concerned.

Fortunately, everyone in that raft is OK, if not a little bruised from being pounded against the rocks by the powerful current. Apparently, the wetsuits provide a decent amount of cushioning.

Nick returns after a few minutes, smiling, mentioning that the guide of that raft was trying to get certified today but probably failed. The problem with all these extreme sports activities is you can never tell when the guides are joking or being serious, but I think he’s being serious this time. I resist the urge to ask if Nick himself is certified, scared for what he might answer.

Nick appears to know what he’s doing, as he skillfully guides us down the killer rapid smoothly and quickly. One of the commands he taught us is “GET DOWN!” which basically means hop into the bottom of the raft and hold on for dear life. We learn very quickly the importance of this command as we plunge down the first rapid. Overall, it wasn’t too horrible, and the water is a bit warmer than the freezing water from caving yesterday.

After we make it to the bottom of the first rapid, I turn around, look, and saw we that we just went down a 4 or 5 foot water fall. Wow. If I had seen that before hand, I would have definitely protested the insane act of trying to go down the waterfall in our proverbial barrel, but Nick makes it easy.

CLASS 5: Needless to say, I am confident in Nick’s abilities now and look forward to the rest of the river, with a “BRING IT ON!” type attitude. We navigate several more class 4’s, then approach our first class 5. We park on the side and Nick gives us some instructions. One part of this rapid is called the Toaster. The rocks earn the name because they’re so close together that if the raft goes through it, it’s like a piece of toast going into a Toaster. Nick emphasizes the importance of getting down in this situation, should we encounter it. The thought of being wedged between a raft and two rocks is rather disturbing, so I hope we don’t end up in it.

As it turns out, we navigate it nearly flawlessly. As I turn back to look up the rapid, I am truly amazed what we just came down.

GOING SOLO: We do several more rapids, with cool names like “the Roller Coaster”. We get to one class 3 and park the raft. Nick tells us we can get out and swim this one if we want. I’m a little skeptical, but Nick’s advice hasn’t led us astray yet, so I figure it’s worth a shot. He instructs us to “Just make sure you take your breaths carefully, and keep your feet up.”

The reason for the feet up thing is so if your foot catches something, you don’t get slammed face first into the rapid by the current, where you will really be in trouble.

I hop out of the raft and start paddling. Swimming in a strong river current is truly scary. You can paddle like hell, but you barely go anywhere except where the river wants you to go. I’m swept away down the river. At first, it’s not so bad, even almost pleasant. That doesn’t last for long. As I enter the first rock, I get sucked under for a bit. When I resurface, I gasp in some air, but catch a little water in the process.

I get sucked under again. I struggle to keep my feet in front of me. There’s water, noise, and cold everywhere. To add to the confusion, I look behind me, and see another group’s raft bearing down on me. I think they’re probably laughing at me, but I’m worried I’m going to get plowed over by them and try to paddle out of the way.

Fortunately, the current keeps me ahead of them and I continue my water-logged journey down the rapid. One of the other guys floats up besides me gasping for breath – I help him keep his head up while he recovers from the combination of inhaling water and a too-tight life jacket.

Eventually, we make it to clear water again, and the nightmare is over. It is truly one of the scariest experiences I have had, and taught me real respect for the power of fast-moving water. In retrospect, there was a very low probability of me getting actually hurt, but the lessons learned are valuable.

The rest of the trip is more of the same. At one point, Nick turns control of the raft over to the guide-in-training. I can’t quite make out what he’s saying, so I just copy what everyone else is doing. The river has eased up a bit, so it doesn’t really matter what you do.

Overall, the experience was fantastic and I highly recommend it to anyone who even remotely likes extreme activities. It wasn’t horribly difficult, but it definitely wasn’t easy either.

Afterwards, we carry the raft back up to the top of the hill, and we hang out for a while waiting for the other group to finish. We found a nice spot on a cliff to sit and watch the river for a while, and the view is quite pretty.

ZORBING: When the other group finishes, we load up the van and go off searching for a thing called “Zorbing.”

Zorbing is best defined as the thing everyone thought of as a kid but never bothered to put it together. The basic idea is you get inside a giant 10-foot diameter plastic ball filled with water and roll down a hill in it. You can load up two or three people in it to make it more interesting. It’s pretty wild, but pricey too - $40NZ for a 30-second ride. I decide to sit this one out and take pictures instead.

You really just need to look at the pictures to appreciate this one. When people exit the Zorb, it looks like the thing is giving birth. Our group went down a few times, and everyone was absolutely giddy when they pop out at the bottom. I get a little jealous, but we’ll have an opportunity to go again soon in Queenstown.

After Zorbing, we go take a quick spin through the Agrodome, a local attraction. The actual facility fell quite short of my expectations for the place; I had visions of a giant facility filled with all sorts of fun activities inside. Instead, the Agrodome is a collection of redneck sporting events that you might find in backwoods Georgia. To add insult to injury, they didn’t have a street luge that we were looking for.

FRIED GOODNESS: So, that brings us to our journey back. 6 hours of driving on NZ roads. Fun. The only thing of note here is we stopped at a Fish and Chips place aptly named “the Grand Central Fry.” We had read about in some tour guide. Imagine the Varsity, but with fish instead of burgers ‘n dogs.

I order a piece of some fish I don’t remember the name of, and some “garlic chips” aka fries drenched in garlic butter. I receive a neat little package of butcher paper that’s piping hot. I unwrap the bundle to a conflicting sight. Part of me is delighted, but at the same time I can feel my arteries trying to run away in protest. Unfortunately, arteries lost this battle and I demolished the fried pile of goodness. My stomach felt a little queasy afterwards, possibly from the injection of a quart of frying oil into my system, but I was satisfied as well.

I was surprised there wasn’t a coronary surgeon set up next door.

The drive back was a long 6 hour uneventful drive at night. The only interesting part was we weren’t quite sure where our dorm was located downtown, so we ended up guessing. By some crazy chance, we get it right. I think I’ve used up my luck for this week…

Until next time,

--P