Day Thirty One - White Water Rafting in Banos

This morning we were up early again for a quick breakfast and then headed off to GeoTours for our second excursion - White Water Rafting!!

There was a lot of hanging about this morning. We arrived at the office at 9, and as we were such a large group, waited whilst everyone else arrived and got their kit. Same as yesterday minus the wetsuit jacket! We then got into the mini bus and drove to the river. Once at the river, we all changed into our wetsuits and helmets and life jackets and then waited for ages whilst another company did their safety talk before we could have ours! Our guide was pretty cool, we were split into groups of six, we were with two America girls, a French Canadian girl and a Danish guy. Someone decided to nickname us Team Sexy which was an interesting choice looking at us!!!

After we were all briefed up on the rafting health and safety we grabbed our boat and took it down to the river. Our guide seemed to be running the tour so we were at the back of the group. We watched everyone do the first rapid and then tackled it ourselves.

I'm not really sure how this went so wrong. We managed to get past the worst of the Rapids easily, and then our guide got us caught in a hole so that we could 'go surfing'. Unfortunately the raft tipped and me and another girl came straight out of it! I remembered what we'd been told and navigated myself feet first down the Rapids determined not to let go of my bloody oar, this definitely didn't help! I saw I was approaching a large rock and managed to swim to the right of it, still being pulled under by the rapids which were really quite strong!! After maybe 30m of flying down through the Rapids constantly bobbing under the water, I managed to grab hold of the 'safety canoe' and without capsizing him, we managed to steer ourselves towards the edge where it was calmer. I realised my GoPro had filmed the whole thing which would make for great watching later!! My raft team caught up with me quickly, the other girl who fell in had managed to swim to the side earlier so hadn't endured quite as much water in the lungs as me!

Back in the boat, I was a little shaken up and had lost a lot of confidence! We carried on going and I was determined not to fall out again! As Brendan and I were in the middle, we didn't have a huge amount of room to wedge our feet in etc, and at one point the delightful American girl in front of me turns and says 'So, you keep hitting me with your paddle...' Bearing in mind I had practically swam half the way down this river whilst they'd been nice and dry paddling along, I tried very hard to bite my tongue and not push her in!!

The next few Rapids went well, we became a really good team and following all the instructions from our guide! One of the toughest Rapids we managed with ease whereas one of the other boats finished this rapid with only 1 member of the team left in the boat! This was a particularly nasty one which would not have been fun to fall in on!

One the last but one rapid, we got through relatively easily, and at the end our guide yells 'Move to the right' which we all obediently did. Of course we'd passed the rapid by this point and suddenly wondered why we'd moved over. The boat 'deliberately' capsized! A couple of guys from another boat pulled me into theirs along with a couple of others as well! When we looked up, three of our team were back in our raft further downstream. It was quite funny!

The last set of Rapids were amazing, we could hardly paddle as the paddles wouldn't reach the water! We were surfing maybe 1 or 2m in the air crashing back down to the water and getting drenched, but we all managed to stay in the boat and it was a hell of a lot of fun!

We got to the end and got out of the raft to get changed. This was one of the best things we've done the whole trip, it was so adrenaline filled and we had such a great time! They drove us to this place for a typical Ecuadorean lunch of soup followed by chicken and beans and veg and rice, which was very much needed!!

Back in Banos, we went back to our hostel to check out the photos which were pretty awesome! We then went back to our room to shower and have a nap after the energy filled morning!

At dinner, we went to claim our free dinner again, spaghetti with the tiniest amount of bolognese tonight! We saw our Montanita buddies again and had a couple of drinks with them before hitting the hay around 10:30pm - a late one for us!!