Miss Lily

I am a quite adventurous girl if I say so myself.. The last few years I've always tried new things that includes adrenaline. Open Water Scuba diving  certificate  in Thailand allowing me to go down to 18 meters under water, later on Advanced Open water to 30 meters in Mozambique with dives in the Philippines, Australia GBR, Fiji, Hawaii, South Africa, Zanzibar and even in the coldness of Sweden. I have found the thrill of skydiving when I gave it to my brother for his birthday and he decided to get back at me so we did it together in Sweden, later on I threw myself out of a plane again in Namibia, just as amazing if not better. I have bungy jumped two of the highest jumps   New Zealand's Nevis 134 meters and South Africa's Bloukrantz Bridge 216 meters high. (Many say it is the two highest as Hong Kong is from a crane and not natural) What gave me the most heart race though was when I had to climb out of Waitomo Caves on New Zealand's north island after abseiling down and by black water rafting watch the glimmering roof filled with glowing worms??. It was only ten meters up but the slippery wall together with my urge to climb it quickly gave me the feeling of falling and I quickly realized that this was a big part of my night mares, falling off cliffs. 

 

I have loved all the different things and will do it over and over again to my parents dreadfulness, I have started not to tell them about it until after I've done it and survived nowadays which seems to be appreciated. ;) Although I've set myself up for trying most things including adrenaline, there still is some things that I always felt a bit too scared of to do. One thing, after Waitimo, is proper climbing which I think I will leave until I have a middle life crisis or something and really need the adrenaline to feel alive. 

 

The other thing is (or should I say was?) White Water Rafting. The fact of me going down rapids in a small boat with only a helmet to protect me against the waves and especially the rocks that could crush a big animal to pieces yet alone a petite person like myself freak me out. I have always had great respect for the power of water and ever since my first step into big waves with my father as a child as well as the first time tumbling around with a surf board  I understood that us humans do not stand a chance against it no matter how hard we try. 

 

So what on earth made me on the 7 May 2013 sit at a table and commit to a full day of one of the hardest white water rafting in the world on the Nile the following day? I can honestly not answer that with a good answer, my fellow travelers called it peer pressure but those who knows me would disagree, however maybe I wanted to face my fear a bit more, skydiving and bungy is fairly secure and the odds of something going wrong is quite small. Not the case in rafting.. 

 

The following day it was time.. By that time I had surrendered to the fact and put my mind to it. We were going to do 4 rapids before lunch and 4 rapids after lunch. Two of the rapids were class 3, four of them were class 4 and two of them class 5. To get a better understanding of it I googled the classifications (luckily after I did it) and will share this with you;

 

 

We put the gear on and listened to all the instructions, practiced how to paddle, sit down and hold on, how to swim with your feet up so you don't  get caught in the rocks, how to get into the air sockets if (sorry I mean WHEN) the raft flips and lands on top of you etc. etc. 

 

Then we were off! The first rapid was a class 5, but not too bad currents our guide said. The thrill of watching the rapid come closer to us was incredible and everything was fine since you had no idea what was in store. ;) Our team was really good at taking orders and paddling so we did the rapid fairly well but somewhere in the middle we hit a wave that flipped us completely. Later on our guide told us he did that deliberately for us to get the feel for it. It was actually good to get that already in the start we later found out.. 

 

After struggling to find the way to surface under the flipped raft and finally on board again with adrenaline pumping like never before we set off towards the two class 3 rapids further down the longest river in the world. Our team did amazingly well on those and we had the time of our lives cruising the waves still on the right side of the raft. 

 

Then we came to the last rapid before lunch which was the second class 5 rapid. That rapid then quickly turned into a class 3 so our guide told us that if we fall in just go with the rapid all the way to the calm water. In order to get to it we had to get off on the river bank and walk down with the raft a bit in order to get over the class 7 waterfall that the rapid started with. We were the first raft to launch and afterwards in the bar we heard the other guides say that we aimed for the roughest part haha. I guess we had to live up to the name of our raft, EXTREME. 

 

The few minutes that followed was probably the worst in my life.. We paddled our raft  into the hole of current and not long before that I was thrown out into the current. What felt like a few minutes was probably just 45 seconds but stuck underneath water that long with not enough air is not nice. I somehow managed to push myself up (god knows how I knew where up was) twice for minimal sips of air before being pushed underneath again. The fear of hitting a rock and the thoughts running through the mind once the air is gone made me appreciate life so much more once I finally got out spitting and gasping for air and saw the Ugandan kayaker coming to pick me up. After I pulled myself up and tightly hugged the front of the kayak with my legs all I could say to the smiling rescuer that asked me if I was ok was Holy Shit! I laugh about it now but it was not funny at the time. 

 

All of us was shaken after that rapid, either from being thrown out or gotten stuck under the seats of the raft while it surfed in the middle of the whirl hole for a good minute and a half. Lunchtime gave us some time to regroup and get some energy before the last four rapids that were all class 4. We did the three first ones without problem and stayed afloat even though we kept to the extreme theme choosing the hardest parts of the rapids while some of the others did the chicken paths. :) In between rapids we enjoyed the rivers amazing nature and bird life and waved to the children bathing and women washing clothes on the banks. We jumped in and let the drift take us down next to the rafts enjoying the sunny weather we luckily enough had. 

 

Last rapid was a hard one but since it was "only" a grade 4 if we flipped we would only stay under for seconds in the current our guide said.. Tension hardened.. He went around to check everyone's life vest which did not comfort us much but there was only one way to get it over and done with and that was through the rapid. After seeing the raft before us completely shoot up in the air with the people being thrown in all directions, we had a couple of paddle strokes, time to get down and hold on (and pray for your life) and we hit the waves which threw the raft vertically up and then backwards. We kept on the raft while it was surfing the whirl and we stayed there long enough for the happiness of staying on it to change to someone screaming "I don't like this anymore!" and fearing that the other raft would crash into us. One by one flew off and finally it flipped with four of us still inside and we were washed away downstream. 

 

The fact that I wrote this much about one day of my life tells me that the fear of dying was worth it in the end.. I will never forget this, the adrenaline and great feeling of riding the waves with sometimes perfection in order to avoid flipping over. I was glad when it was over but was very glad that i did it. I just hope that I won't dream too much about it. ;)