Timmy Travels

After leaving Queenstown I travelled up to Christchurch stopping off for a night at a place called Geraldine to do a spot of white water rafting. It’s supposed to be one of the best places in NZ for it and you get a nights accommodation thrown in and lunch the next day, sweet! The place is right on the river and has great views of the valley, the evening was spent watching DVD’s with my fellow rafters before getting some sleep ready for a day of rafting.

The guys that run the place are hilarious, Ben decided to show us how one of the dogs likes to shag his leg much to the dismay of the Americans in the group and much to the amusement of the rest of us. We geared up for the day in wetsuits, helmets, life jackets etc and headed out to the start of the river, it starts of gentle and works it’s way up to a grade 5 which is the highest grade you can commercially raft.

Once the raft was in the water we all got in and I managed to get up front with Scottish Dave, great for the photos, not so great for falling out potential. Scottish had done some rafting before and said the front is the best place to be but after the first rapid and a face full of water I was starting to wonder what was so great about it. However by the grade 3 rapids I was loving it and couldn’t wait for the grade 5’s. We’d done well so far and managed not to flip the thing or loose anyone over the side. Since we’d done so well it was decided that we should try and purposely flip it so we all dived onto the front and paddled head on into a fast flowing section of water, that did the trick as we all disappeared into the water I came up about 10 meters away along with someone else and we got picked up by team America in the other dingy.

Onwards to the last section of the river, grade 5, this was so much fun seriously crazy water we were all over the shop as we went down it was all over in under a minute. As we got to the bottom we once again paddled into so really fast flowing water and the dingy was being buffeted all over the place, Ben our guide was determined to flip us again. As we headed into it for a second time the dingy suddenly lurch and I was gone, I took a big breath as I felt myself go over the side backwards the water is so powerful it only took a couple of seconds and I was on the surface about 20 meters from the dingy I looked up to see that the photographer who was also in our dingy had also fallen in, at least I wasn’t the only one!