Mary Tripped Out: JANUARY 6

Up early for white water rafting. I’d never been before so I will speak of it like a child on Christmas morning.

Breakfast was pretty good, as the eggs were fresh. No rolls, but more toast, and again some juice. We had a three hour drive ahead of us, with one stop, and most people slept the whole way. However, I was fairly rested, and the scenery was too beautiful to pass up. We drove a bunch of hairpin turns down the west side of the mountains. Everything around us was green, and at times there was a really mystical fog filling in all the nook and crannies. This side of the mountains isn’t considered part of the Amazon rain forest (like the east side) but it is still pretty spectacular.

The bus slowed down in one little town, and the driver bought some local candy from a guy in the street. It’s at taffy type thing, made from sugar cane.

We also stopped at a little cafeteria for restrooms and some people had breakfast again. There was a little shop inside the place, and it had an LSU visor for sale. Talk about random.

We finally made it to where we were putting into the water. We sunscreened and bug sprayed up, and listened to a safety lecture. We grabbed life vests and helmets, our paddles and our boats, and headed out into the river.

Needless to say, my camera didn’t come on this excursion. But a few of us had the little waterproof disposable cameras so pictures do exist. You might see those later.

White water rafting is AWESOME. The whole experience was a little too short, but it was super fun. The water was cold, but really only provided some amount of shock, not any hypothermia. The waves were great. My team was good. I even got to “cowboy” one of the rapids. I had no idea what this meant, but our guide was asking who wanted to get up on the front. And he meant sit on the front edge, with your feet outside the boat (sticking over the front) and holding a rope. Which would be easy enough, if you weren’t WHITE WATER RAFTING. It was a serious exercise in abdominal strength, which I wouldn’t say I really have, but I managed to not fall off. So that was cool. We stopped for lunch, where they had driven ahead of us and set up a barbeque pit and cooked up burgers and hot dogs. There was also cantaloupe, watermelon, and potato chips. There were also more random dogs, and I fed one of them part of my hot dog.

We did the last stretch, then got out of the water to ice chests of beer.

We changed on the bus, girls first, then guys. Then we sat around, some of us helping deflate the boats.

Then Sebastian (guide) gave us a lesson about ants. They were carrying leaves in a long line and we started helping some of them (picking them up by the leaf, and putting them farther down the trail).