Ecuador Day 6 - White Water Rafting

A fun day today with lots of laughs on the water.  We had a full day of white water rafting down the Jatunyacu River with a group of twelve Germans.   We were picked up at 8am by taxi and taken to the raft operators office in Tena. There we jumped into an open truck and had a forty five minute journey to the start point.  We were all given a safety briefing and then the fun began.

There were three rafts, we shared ours with Anya and Andy.   We had a great guide who made us practice a few paddle moves whilst still tied to the shore before setting off.  The first thing he made us all do once we got going was jump into the river, one by one, so we could practice pulling each other back into the raft should we fall out or capsize. The other rafts just got one volunteer to jump in to demonstrate this. The water was quite cold, but it was good to get wet, we were about to get much wetter!

The river was graded class III/III+ and alternated between big rapids and smooth sections.  We travelled about 27km all together. Two and a half hours in the morning, then stopped for lunch, then another couple of hours in the afternoon.  It was great fun, we had lots of laughs.  There was lots of play splashing each other going on along the way.  No one from our raft fell in through the rapids, except our guide!   Nigel had been messing around and hopped onto another raft to try and get revenge on the German groups bus driver by pushing him overboard - he'd been splashing us a lot. So at one point there was just me, Anya and Andy.  We hit a huge dip/whirpool and when we came out of it looked around to see our guide in the river in front of us! Very funny.  No one else fell out unintentionally, only when messing around - everyone except me got pushed or pulled in, I managed to escape some how.   One of the other rafts capsized, and one guy from another raft fell in.  We had a good team!

Hopefully more photos to follow of us in the rafts.  The safety canoeist travelling along side us took lots of photos. The raft company should be emailing them to us.