Row, row, row your boat...
After a day of hard travel we wound up in Boquete - which is a sweet little mountain town in the Chiriqui highlands near Panama's second city of David. Chiriqui is such a nice place that thousands of Americans have taken it upon themselves to retire there. Luckily the influx has not yet reached the level at which they have a McDonalds, but is high enough that there are plenty of useful services like good restaurants, comfortable lodgings and a supermarket or two. The main reason of our visit was not simply to sample the local fare - I was in the market for the local speciality - white water rafting!
For those unfamiliar with the term (is there anyone?) the idea is that you and a team of fellow thrill-seekers board a rubber dinghy and try to avoid as many rocks as possible while staying in the raft. On a sale of 1-5 these rapids are 3-4 so a good time was pretty much guaranteed. Rafting is not Trace's idea of a good time (just like jumping off a cliff attached to a piece of string doesn't particularly appeal to me) so she stayed in bed while I set off to tame the savage river.
When I boarded the bus I found that I was to be rafting with an entire (23 strong) school party - twenty seventeen year olds and their three teachers. While that wasn't exactly a wonderful prospect, at least they were English speakers (they're from Staffordshire) and we ended up having quite a good laugh. The students were divided into fives and each five wound up with either a teacher or me plus a guide. I was 'entrusted' with five of the little 'uns and luckily we managed to get to the end without losing any.
To begin with the water was pretty rough. We had a few hairy moments straight away when we almost lost some people overboard but on the whole we survived unscathed. Things got a whole lot worse pretty quickly when we hit the next set of rapids. We were pitched around a bit and suddenly seven had become five. After a quick glance around we saw that one of the crew had managed to hang onto the side but the other had already been swept away. Worse still, in the confusion, we'd suffered a casualty as someone's paddle had ended up cracking a girl across the face. As I hauled the nearby 'overboardee' into the raft, the guide was trying to steer us past the worst of the rocks and into the calmer water at the edge of the river. In the end we managed to get everyone back in the dinghy and luckily our casualty was more shocked than hurt so after getting our breath back, we set off once again.
We were buffeted and tossed all over the place for the next couple of hours. The highlight was when we managed to lose three people from our boat at the same time - as well as four paddles(!) - when we hit a rock. One poor chap from another boat wound up perched on a boulder in the middle of a raging torrent and had to be rescued by an intrepid guide and someone else was almost impaled upon a jutting tree-branch, but after a while, the river calmed down and the last few kilometres were pretty tame. I was one of only a few who had managed to avoid being pitched over the side of the dinghy.
We got back to Boquete at about 4pm where I bid fairwell to my new-found companions and immediately had a well earned sleepie.
For those unfamiliar with the term (is there anyone?) the idea is that you and a team of fellow thrill-seekers board a rubber dinghy and try to avoid as many rocks as possible while staying in the raft. On a sale of 1-5 these rapids are 3-4 so a good time was pretty much guaranteed. Rafting is not Trace's idea of a good time (just like jumping off a cliff attached to a piece of string doesn't particularly appeal to me) so she stayed in bed while I set off to tame the savage river.
When I boarded the bus I found that I was to be rafting with an entire (23 strong) school party - twenty seventeen year olds and their three teachers. While that wasn't exactly a wonderful prospect, at least they were English speakers (they're from Staffordshire) and we ended up having quite a good laugh. The students were divided into fives and each five wound up with either a teacher or me plus a guide. I was 'entrusted' with five of the little 'uns and luckily we managed to get to the end without losing any.
To begin with the water was pretty rough. We had a few hairy moments straight away when we almost lost some people overboard but on the whole we survived unscathed. Things got a whole lot worse pretty quickly when we hit the next set of rapids. We were pitched around a bit and suddenly seven had become five. After a quick glance around we saw that one of the crew had managed to hang onto the side but the other had already been swept away. Worse still, in the confusion, we'd suffered a casualty as someone's paddle had ended up cracking a girl across the face. As I hauled the nearby 'overboardee' into the raft, the guide was trying to steer us past the worst of the rocks and into the calmer water at the edge of the river. In the end we managed to get everyone back in the dinghy and luckily our casualty was more shocked than hurt so after getting our breath back, we set off once again.
We were buffeted and tossed all over the place for the next couple of hours. The highlight was when we managed to lose three people from our boat at the same time - as well as four paddles(!) - when we hit a rock. One poor chap from another boat wound up perched on a boulder in the middle of a raging torrent and had to be rescued by an intrepid guide and someone else was almost impaled upon a jutting tree-branch, but after a while, the river calmed down and the last few kilometres were pretty tame. I was one of only a few who had managed to avoid being pitched over the side of the dinghy.
We got back to Boquete at about 4pm where I bid fairwell to my new-found companions and immediately had a well earned sleepie.
posted by Iff at
8:03 pm
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