Posts tagged 'Uganda'

Uganda - White Water Rafting, Tracking Chimps and Teaching Orphans
November 1st 2013, 7:02:00 pm

After crossing into Uganda our first stop was Jinja, the second largest city in Uganda and its unofficial extreme sports capital. We had a free day here to do whatever activities took our fancy; some people went and played mini-golf, some went and played regular golf, but I opted for white water rafting down the White Nile.

All up there was seven people from our Dragoman group who went along, who with our American guide Tyler made up a full raft of people. We got taken to the "put in" point where we were given some breakfast, sorted out with high-flotation life vests and paddles and then were led down to our raft for some basic training, which involved things like paddling in time, turning, getting down low in the raft, flipping the raft and climbing back in. It was all pretty straightforward stuff and the water was a lovely refreshing temperature. A lot of people struggled to get back into the raft unassisted, but I surprised myself by being one of the ones who could! I can't even do a single chin up, but I guess climbing back into a raft probably uses a lot of the same muscles that I built up last year being stuck on crutches for nearly 6 months.

The first rapid of the day was one of the most fun and memorable ones, it was basically a three metre waterfall drop off, followed closely by two more pools of rapids. We went down the waterfall, which felt like a theme park flume log ride on steroids, then paddled as hard as we could for the bigger pool of rapids but the current was too strong and we ended up going down the less turbulent path.