We were given a long-sleeved shirt, a fleece long sleeve, a wet suit, booties, a helmet, and then another jacket. Our bus ride to the drop off point took about thirty minutes through beautiful, rolling hills, and farms. Sheep dotted the landscape. I wished that the windows of the bus weren't so dirty. I had my water proof camera which wouldn't have given outstanding pictures, but at least pictures. Good thing we have memories.
We had more instruction before getting in our rafts and starting down the river. Besides our guide, Spencer, there were five of us in the raft. Chris and I along with three girls--Matilda and Josie from Norway and Anna from America. Anna was the first to be dumped from the raft, almost as soon as we got going. She was a little embarrassed.
I was the next one to get dumped as we went down our first rapid. Another boat came up behind me and scrunched me against the side of our raft. Chris was quick to haul me back in to the boat. Refreshing, but I would have preferred staying in the raft.
As we were going through another section of rapids, one of the guys on another raft lost his paddle. All three of the rafts stopped. One guide had his people hold their raft in place as he went to retrieve the paddle. The guide from the second raft, from which the paddle had been lost, stood up on a rock making sure the paddle could be retrieved. As the first guide passed by, he threw the paddle in the air and the second guide jumped off the rock, caught the paddle in mid air, and swam back to his boat.
Matilda had been anchoring us by hanging on to a rope conveniently attached to the rocks. She let go after the two other boats passed by us, we seemed to be the anchor raft, and we were all on our way again.
That wasn't the last time for us to be in the water though as our guide wasn't able to keep the raft from overturning further downstream and dumping us all. I swallowed a huge gulp of water as I tried to get out from under the raft and then tried to float on my back with my feet in front of me as we had been instructed. We were all wearing life jackets, but the back floating position was mostly impossible, especially as I was hanging on to my paddle.
An extra guide was in a kayak taking pictures of us all the way down the river. He finally hauled me on to his kayak and then transferred me to our raft once it was righted. Chris had been hauled from the river by people on another raft. That was fun. Not really, but at least our wet suits kept us warm; they said the temperature of the water was about 70ish degrees, so at least we didn't freeze. We continued on through class three through five rapids until after about two and half hours, we floated up to the river bank next to River Valley.
We all climbed out of the raft and carried it back up to the raft shed. We removed our helmets first and returned them, then our over jacket, next our fleece and long sleeved shirt, and finally we slid our wet suits off while we showered. I think that must have made them easier to remove. Since we had to check out of our room before leaving on the raft trip, we had to make use of the community bathrooms and facilities to change and dry off. I put on a little make up, combed through my hair, and tried to keep the sand flies from biting me. I had to put on bug spray to keep those little buggers away.
Chris and I checked out all of the photos and would have like to have a copy, but the memory stick was $80 for each raft group. The girls from our raft decided they didn't want to split the cost, so we would have ended up paying the full $80 ourselves. We opted not to. We took care of any extras on our bill, and were on our way.
The rental car needed to be back at Hertz by 6 pm when they closed or we would have been charged an extra day. We had plenty of time with a short stop for lunch in Taihape at Soul Cafe. We stopped at this cute little shop called Piccadilly next to the restaurant and found a beautiful flower pot to be a memento of our trip. As we drove, we chatted a little with the girls. We had been off the grid at the lodge, so it was nice to touch base again. The girls had been watching The Oscars. We facetimed with Kristen as she got ready for bed, and Misha got out of bed to say hi to us. We prayed with Kristen before she climbed into bed and then said good night. We were nearing Wellington and needed to get back on Google Maps to navigate our way to our hotel--Amora--for the night.
It was rush hour, so it required a lot more concentration on Chris' part as he drove. We checked in to the hotel. I went up to the room with the luggage and Chris headed off to Hertz to return the car. He had to fill up the car first. $100! Their gas was about $6 a gallon.
This was my view from the hotel room. Beautiful huh?
While Chris was gone, I organized our stuff for our flight home in the morning. We had gone through a lot of our snacks, but still had some to pack. He returned and we headed off to dinner. We ended up a little place called Ellington's for burgers-mine was falafel again. Since we were further down the pier, closer to Oriental Bay, it was a little more residential. We decided to go for a walk. They had a few beach boxes, though they were used more for storing boating supplies. We walked further to a grassy beach area where lots of families were enjoying the beautiful evening and kids were jumping into the bay.
Since we had an early morning flight at 6:45 am, and we would need to be up early, we showered before going to bed.