One of our days in Vic Falls we went off in the morning for our White Water Rafting adventure. We had a large agricultural truck that we all had to clamber in and sit on the make shift seats that someone had put in the back of this truck – this was our transfer to the mighty Zambezi River. Helen was pretty calm I have to say, unusually so actually – she hates being dunked under water and yet here she was going white water rafting – I thought that she must know what she’s doing. They showed us a video of what may happen when we get thrown out of the raft. This detailed being sucked under by eddies, raft flipping over on top of us and the technique of getting back in the raft which involves someone dunking you under so that the life vest will pop you back up and give you enough momentum to pull us back in the raft. I turned to Helen thinking, excellent adventure, to see her crying – and she hadn’t even reached the river yet! She hadn’t thought that she may be thrown from the raft, let alone sucked under by eddie currents! I managed to calm her down a little but she was a little anxious to say the least.
We got to the river, or should I say the cliff above the river. The river looked quit calm and peaceful from up here. We had to walk, in our flip flops, down a wooden ladder built out of tree branches, to the river, 300 metres below where we were standing. A bit hectic. We reached the Zambezi river to meet our raft guides. We proceeded to have a practice of jumping out of the raft and getting back in, all in calm water, not much of a realistic practice I thought.
We setoff – some of the rapids are scary enough to have names – Washing Machine, Terminator 1 and 2, Double Trouble, Oblivion etc. Others were just numbers like Rapid # 14. The first “rapid” we came to wasn’t even named and wasn’t really a rapid, just a ripple in the water but it flipped about 5 of us out nevertheless including Helen and I. We got Helen back in but she looked petrified. I asked her whether she wanted to go in the safety raft (which still had to shoot the rapids) and she later said that she just wanted to be with me as she knew I would look after her. It turns out that this was probably the best thing for her.
We went down all the rapids, some of the better rapids I've uploaded videos of - Rapid 11 (no name) is above.
Above here is Rapid 13, named "The Mother". It was an odd thing, the rapids that looked really bad from a distance, we just floated over and the rapids that looked like we'd just float over gave us a really hard time, or threw us out of the raft or just simply flipped us, very weird.
Rapid 16B (above) flipped the raft completely so that Helen and I were just flipped 6 foot in the air over the top of the raft and plonked in the water which was just sucking you under and throwing you further down the river – all pretty amazing and adrenalin pumping stuff – I loved it. Helen was getting used to it but couldn’t really say that she was liking any of it really. The other boat in our group wanting to emulate our flip but couldn't, so they just dived into the Zambezi - Mad!
Rapid 18 - Oblivion (video above, photo below) was an interesting one.
We got down it having gone over 2 grade 5 rapids, these are the largest grade rapid that you can go over in a commercial trip, it was amazing. You could tell when there was a good rapid coming up, you could hear it before you could see it, that just added to the moment. One of the rapids, The Washing Machine I think, just kept the boat stationery but still it was riding the waves, just like a bucking broncho, it seemed like ages we were in it but we eventually got out and continued on our way.
Some of the highlights are shown in the video above.
Later on down the river, they let us just jump in the river and float down the rapids, they were only grade 2’s, this was quite exhilarating – Helen stayed in the boat and was worried for me but it was all fine. One of our guides in the kayak went for a surf - see video above.
It was such a fantastic adventure, I’d definitely do it all over again but don’t think I can say the same for Helen but I was still so proud of her for completing it. What a day!
