El rafting

Well, looks like we survived our rafting more or less intact! Most serious injury was a spot of sunburn - a couple of our group fell in from time to time, but (against all odds) Katherine and I remained in the raft at all times!

So, our group: eight people in total, four Venezuelan hombres de negocio, a Swedish chap, a German chap, and the two of us.

We left Merida at 8am in a jeep (just the four non-Venezuelans; the others got there under their own steam), and drove through the Andes and cloud forest. We stopped in Barinitas, on the edge of Los Llanos, for lunch. The area is famed for its yummy cows, so the three carnivores had fantastic steaks - our guide, John, and Katherine, made do with cheese and salad instead. We also had plantains (of course) and yucca. Yucca is some sort of root, or something, and tastes almost identical to potatoes. (Indeed, McDonald's fries are often made of it, rather than potatoes, because it's a bit cheaper).

We reached our base camp near Barinas by about 2pm, and less than an hour later eight of us, plus our pilot Hector and John's son, were bouncing downstream in a raft. It's a pretty simple concept: the pilot shouts derecha or izquierda (right, left), according to the direction he wants the boat to go, and you row in the appropriate direction. The rapids on the first day reached grade 3, which was pretty tough in places, but nothing we couldn't handle! We stopped at the banks along the way to do crazy stunts like jumping in off big rocks, dangling off tree branches, and getting swept along by the rapids (needless to say, Katherine declined to participate in many of these activities :-). Eventually we came to a bridge, where we were picked up by John and brought back to camp.

We spent the afternoon recovering (we'd only been in the water for less than two hours). At 7pm we trooped up to a nearby farmhouse, whose occupants had prepared a meal for us (spag bol - or spag soya bol for Katherine and John), with ice tea, soup and salad. Needless to say, we slept soundly that night! (And used our mosquito net for the first time).

We woke up early the next day, to the sound of birds singing in the trees!, and breakfasted at the same house. Our meal was fresh melon juice (yum!) and arepas (yum! - made from wheat rather than maize, Andean style) stuffed with perico (yum! a mix of scrambled egg, onions and tomatoes).

This time, rather than launch from our camp, we drove up a dirt track to a point further upstream. We were in two boats this time, four plus pilot in each. This time we entered the water by first throwing the boats of a bridge, then jumping into the water ourselves to get in! (Katherine didn't do that either :-). The river was a bit more treacherous, and there were a couple of hairy moments, and we all got flung around inside the boat, but Hector kept us on-course and after a few hours we arrived back at our camp.

White-water rafting was fantastically fun, every bit as cool as you might imagine it to be. The river near Barinas is apparently one of the best places in Venezuela to do it, and we both had a great time!