Dan's Adventure

“This one makes my bum twitch like a rabbit’s nose” announces Scotty as we approach “Gullivers travels”, rapid seven on the Zambezi. A grade 5 rapid, and the most technical that we are to face, requires Scott to navigate us between two rocks, named the goalposts, before hitting a series of large waves. Going between the goalposts is the more difficult option, we could have gone around, but we opted for danger. Our choice, on looking back, wasn’t the best as the water turned out to be too shallow for that part of the rapid so our raft got stuck momentarily on the rocks between the goalposts. Just as I was thinking to myself that it would be a bad time to fall out of the raft, Claire tumbled over the side, reappearing seconds later at the opposite end of the raft waiting to be dragged back on board. Amazingly, over the whole day, only Claire and I fell out of the raft on our own, I was the first, falling when we weren’t even on a rapid and whilst laughing at my misfortunate Claire tumbled over the side too. On rapid ten, “gnashing jaws of death”, Scotty decided it was time for us all to take a dip as he flipped the raft, sending all of us into the water. “Don’t panic” was the message at the safety briefing in the morning, but when you find yourself underneath the raft struggling to get out its kind of hard not to panic a little bit.

The seven of us from the Acacia Africa truck chose to do a full day of rafting. The morning saw us tackle the hardest rapids, going up to grade 5, and the afternoon was a more chilled affair. Crocodiles watched us from the rocks as we drifted by, floating along admiring the scenery, paddling between long flat stretches and tackling a few small rapids along the way.

I had never been rafting before and was quite nervous beforehand, but I absolutely loved it. From the minute we were told to jump off 10 foot rocks into the Zambezi at the start of the day, through being trapped under the raft after falling out, right through to having a couple of beers on the jeep back to the campsite. Fantastic day and absolutely shattering, I was tucked up in bed by half 7!