Thursday 4 June 2009

Grade 5: 5 stars

Still in San Gil: as mentioned in the previous post, today was day of rafting…

Rio Suarez runs in a gorgeous canyon, but the landscape is still no rival to the stunning beauty of the lush steep cliffs and waterfalls of Rio Pacuaré in Costa Rica, where I rafted before in this trip. And Pacuaré also beats Suarez in terms of length of the trip and the incredible number of consecutive - almost non-stop - rapids, one after the other, all the way down.

But sometimes experiences leave a mark not because of the “average thrill” they provide, but because of the peak of excitement you achieve. That’s the case of rafting in Rio Suarez.

Most of the rapids range here from grade 2 to 4+, the same as in Rio Pacuare (by the way, for a quick guide on rapids’ classification, check
http://www.proriverrunners.com/index.php?page=78). But then it came the last rapid, of grade 5. It distinguished itself from the remaining due to the above average size of the waves and holes, and its length. You’re just thrown up and down, right and left, over and over again, for quite some time. You’re called the “Down!” command (that's when you need to get down and seat on the bottom of the raft and hold yourself to the security rope, to avoid being thrown overboard) 3 or 4 times, one right after the other, with just enough time for a couple of paddle thrusts in-between. You can’t see much of what’s happening outside the raft – just water, blue sky and water again. And great, great fun.

Result: two folks in the raft ahead of us were thrown overboard – no injuries, just half-scared half-excited faces and something to laugh about. Our raft had nothing to report.


But no reason to brag about it – we had gone before through the humiliation of, in a smaller rapid, getting the raft stuck in a huge rock, an inch away from rolling over, with water filling it in its entirety, and the six of us hanging on the same side of the raft (the only part still above water level), trying to keep it balanced. We stayed like that for what it seemed a long time, until we managed to release ourselves and descend the rest of the rapid with the raft backwards, and without much control of the direction. During that operation the instructor on our boat kept his cool while speaking in English ("It's OK guys, no problem. It's under control!") but let go a bit more in Spanish (“¡Ah! ¡La gran puta!”).

I can’t wait to do this again…


Whitewater, Rio Suarez

Jumping back to the raft, after a short relaxing swim in shallow water

_ Gorgeous canyon...

Where have I seen this before? I'm the first guy to your right on the video. By the way, this is not the class 5 rapid - this one is class 3, if I'm not mistaken

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