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Blog - Jinja mark 1 and 2
This blog entry is about a month late but oh well....
For the last 2 weeks we have spent our weekends in jinja - a town to the east of Kitega - and the source of the River Nile. The first of these was for my birthday and the second for parnter's Blair and Gregg's birthday. We celebrated this in stile by white water rafting down some of the fiercest rapids in the world. As I'm pretty scared of water, to be honest, the idea fo this terrified me. I nearly drowned when we went swimming in a pool a couple of weeks before, so I didn't really know quite how I'd cope with this!! It turned out to be incredibly fun - but still absoloutly terrifying. We'd only been in the raft for about 10 minutes - when I started getting scared at the site of all the members of one of the other rafts suddenly standing up and diving into the water. And then to make things even better the leader of their raft turned the boat upside down and stood on the top of it whacking it with a paddle and shouting abuse. A few minutes later I had my first near drowning experience! We got mout the boat to practice floating down one of the small rapids just on our backs. We were told to float with our feet first and i was having a lovely time doing just that when our raft decided to float over the top of me! This was a horrible experience as I couldn't get the boat off of me and actually thought I was going to die. Thankfully I didn't!
The next scary moment came when after goind down a few rapids, we were asked whether we wanted to flip the boat. We took a vote and everyone bar me voted to do it. Excellet. I nearly cried. So, as we surfed down the next rapid, we were instucted to "get down" and hold the side of the boat and the next thing I knew I was flying through the air out of the boat. Aaaaaaaah! They said to try and hold on to your paddle, but there was no chance of this when I didn't even know which way was up. One minute your in the boat happily and the next your under the water and everything around you is white. I felt like I was under water for aobut 10 minutes, but it was probably more liek 10 seconds. When I finally came up it was almost worse because I just breathed in a mouthful of water and started choking! Thankfully there were loads of safety canoes with riduclously muscly Ugandans plucking people out of the water!
So all in all the rafting was a pretty fun experience although my nerves didn't really enjoy it much!! From now on I tihnk I will trya dn stay on dry land...
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