Team Bazirra!

"The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun."

Christopher McCandless 

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For all of you who read my blog to make sure Linden, Tessa, Kathryn, and I are still alive, I apologize for keeping you waiting. We had a little bit of trouble getting the pictures from a couple weekends ago, and I couldn't post anything without them.

Remember how I said I had big plans and to keep your fingers crossed that they didn't fall through? I was worried because we had another intern come, Lauren, and she was only here for a week. Since she was here for such a limited time, we weren't sure that she could take a whole day off work to come with us... Good news! Everything worked out perfectly and the five of us did one of the coolest things that Africa has to offer:

That's what's up. We went whitewater rafting on the Nile! We were by far the coolest team out on the river.

From left to right:
Fred, Spencer, Kathryn, Linden, Roberto (our guide), me, Lauren,
Tessa, and Marvin

The very first rapid we encountered was a Class 5. The most dangerous rapids are Class 6. Why mess around with those wimpy Class 1's and 2's when you can just dive right in (pun intended)?

Class 5 waterfall: our introduction to the Nile

In fact, we rafted on nothing but 4's and 5's the whole day. There was one Class 6 but we weren't allowed to raft that one. I tried convincing Roberto to let us go, but he mumbled something about "danger" and "legal consequences" and other crap like that.

Our team was ready to handle anything though. We named ourselves Team Bazirra, aka Team Warrior. In my humble opinion, we handled the rapids the best. And we definitely were the fastest. We were getting into races with other rafts the whole day, and guess who won every single time? Team Bazirra, duh.

Halfway through the day, we stopped at an island in the middle of the Nile to eat lunch. Before reaching the island, we fondly referred to it as Lunch Island but we changed the name once we saw it:

Source

Welcome to Bat Island! When we were still a little ways out from the island, we saw this dark cloud of creatures flying around and assumed they were birds. Nope. Swarms of bats were flying just feet over our heads. We weren't able to get any pictures because none of us had our cameras with us on the raft - I found the above picture from another girl's blog. That photo doesn't even come close to the number of bats we saw on our trip. I've never seen that Alfred Hitchcock movie The Birds, but I imagine what we saw on the Nile was similar to that. Just substitute bats in place of the birds. And none of them attacked us.

All day long, I was doing great on the rapids if I do say so myself. I never even came close to falling out of the raft. Well, the Nile apparently needed to remind me exactly who was in charge. I got thrown out of the raft on the last rapid. Roberto told us it was a Class 5 so I thought it would be a piece of cake... I think he lied. It had to have been a Class 6 - it folded our raft in half!

Moments before I almost died in the Nile

See that poor, unfortunate soul with her feet in the air and head
in the Nile? Yep, that's yours truly.

I've never prayed so hard in my life for a single breath of air. The logical part of my brain knew that I wasn't going to die, but it's hard to listen to the logical side when thousands of gallons of raging water is beating you around. I'm pretty sure I inadvertently swallowed half of the Nile. I probably have about 12 families of parasites living inside of me right now. The joys of Africa living!

Long story short, I survived! I popped up near Tessa, so we just floated down the rest of the river together. The Nile is actually pretty peaceful and relaxing when it's not trying to drown you. 

Once we got to shore and met back up with our group, we found out that everyone got thrown off the raft except for Linden and Fred. Even our guide got dumped into the river!

Shoutout to Linden, who was the ONLY member of Team Bakirra
to never fall off the raft!

Everything about this day was perfect, including my NDE at the end. How cool is it that I can go home and tell people I almost died in the Nile?

Every time I experience something new here, I think that nothing else can top it. But Uganda always proves me wrong. I love this place and I love the experiences I'm lucky enough to participate in.