Officially your tour finishes after breakfast but most people will spend the day White Water Rafting, a not-to-be-missed experience of a lifetime! Vic Falls offers many exciting alternatives such as a walk with lions or a bungee jump from the bridge that joins Zimbabwe with Zambia.
Optional Activities: Full day white water rafting, Flight over the falls, Full day low/high water river boarding, sunset cruise, bungee jump (solo), morning/afternoon lion or elephant encounter.
Meals: Breakfast
13 January 2014
Today Lisa and I were headed for the white water rafting. It was us and two of the Brisvegas six, (Mark and Millie) we got up and headed for breakfast, whilst I was eating Millie (otherwise known as princess) walked up and asked could she leave her stuff in our room as they had to check out and weren't comfortable leaving anything with reception.
"no problem" I said getting up to go and open the room for her,
"It's okay, I'll wait until Mark gets here" was Millie's reply,
"no worries" I said sitting back down,
With that Millie walked off sat at another table and had breakfast. The puzzling thing was that there were plenty of spare seats at our table, nor did she bother with any pleasantries like good morning how are you? Mark also came past and nor did he bother, I think that they seriously lack some social skills to say the least.
Another starter turned up - a Japanesse girl who was not staying at the Adventure Lodge, so we had 5 punters altogether. We got the usual sign your life away before the rafting and then it was onto the truck to the jump off site. I had jarred my right knee the day before so the walk down was a little on the painful side but I sucked it up and walked down the 4 billion steps to the bottom of the gorge.
A quick rafting lesson from Simon our guide and we were good to go, Simon suggested we take a dip before we departed so he could get himself sorted and with that we all went overboard. Everyone except me chose to gently enter the water, I chose the jumping backflip of the edge of the raft, It was perfectly executed as there was almost no splash and I didn't lose my sunglasses (Joram) nor did I lose my Panasonic underwater video camera. (it was attached to my life jacket) We got back on the raft with Mark being the last one on board, as he got in he realise that he had lost his Gopro that was attached to his chest harness. But the really dumb thing was that they/he hadn't changed the memory card at all, it was the same card that they had used from the beginning of their trip. Stupid, really stupid, now people get why I use 4Gig cards and change them regularly.
I hate to say the rest of the rafting trip was not as eventful as I would have liked, we went down two Class 5 rapids and I didn't even notice. The whole day's rafting seemed like a pretty tame affair, the guides basically suggested that I need to come back in low water because that's when it gets hard core. Simon pointed out how high the water can get during high water which was about 10 meters above the level we were at.
The guides on our raft and the other rafts tried to make it as entertaining as possible by dragging people of each others rafts, sledging each other etc. Simon referred to one of the other guys as fat boy for obvious reasons, but I think I got the best sledge in on Simon as he was using sunscreen... I mean seriously what is a black man doing using sunscreen?
After my sledges Simon wanted to see me go in, but the rapids were just too tame for the most part, Lisa and I both fell out on the last rapid a Grade 2 rapid. It was more like a ripple rather than a rapid, just goes to show you shouldn't fall asleep whilst white water rafting. When I fell out I took in some Zambezi stomach cleanser and then realised I was facing the wrong way so I turned around to see Lisa had also fallen out and lost her paddle, so instead of filming I picked up her paddle and then headed for the rescue kayak.
Later Lisa would tell me of her near death experience, trapped under the raft for hours not knowing which way to go and in desperation releasing the paddle to fend for itself.... blah blah blah. Seriously it was a ripple!!! Lisa would just like to point out that time moves slowly when you are underwater & you haven't figured out which way is up yet.
Some of the crew were still around so we went out to dinner with them, which was nice as it truly was our last hurrah. I also learnt how ugly the Brisvegas six really were, they didn't really affect me as they kept out of my way but the guys really were the ugly Australians abroad. With the only exception being Sam, she was actually nice and from what I was told she didn't really like the boys much either, she just got stuck with them.
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