Today was an early start to a beautiful Saturday morning in Turangi. My mom and grandma had woken up a bit before I did and it was a pleasant morning to wake up slowly and gently. There was a morning “breakfast” that the hosts were having in the lodge’s lounge so we made our way over to that around 9:20 AM this morning. Rae, one of our hosts, had fresh breakfast scones waiting for us along with coffee and tea and it was a great chance to meet the other people who were staying at the lodge for the week. It is mostly older couples but we have a pretty good spread of people from across the world. There are families from Australia, Canada, the United States and South Africa staying here this week.
So once everyone had arrived Jim, the other host, gave us a great introduction to the Turangi and Taupo region. There was a lot of information covering a lot of different topics, but we all sat tight and managed to stay attentive and focused throughout his whole speech. We heard a lot about the Tongariro National Park with all of the hikes and tracks that you can walk and we’ve decided that we are going to spend a day doing the short walks throughout the park and hopefully see Mount Doom. The major saving grace to Jim’s long adventure of talking about the local adventures were guides from fishing companies, white water rafting guides, and a massage spa. It was great to hear about all of the things that you can do in this region and there is definitely not a shortage of things to do here.
My grandma decided that as soon as the white water rafting guides got up and spoke that we were going to go rafting today. So my mom and I jumped on board and we ended up scheduling a rafting adventure for 2:00 PM this afternoon. Lord help us all. But we were all excited and we sat through the rest of Jim’s information speech and eventually we were free to go about our day. We had a few hours to kill before we were to head out on our rafting adventure. It was just enough time for my mom to take a quick power nap and for my grandma and I to eat some lunch. We enjoyed the down time to get a good idea of the things we wanted to do while we were here and we came up with a very long list of things that we can see and do. Imagine that. There is always something to do in New Zealand.
At 1:50 PM, Ryan from Tongariro River Rafting came to pick us up from the Kaimanawa Lodge. He was the same one who came to speak to us earlier that day at Jim’s information extravaganza and he was going to be one of our guides for the day. The rafting building wasn’t far at all from where we were staying and it was dead quiet when we got there. As it turns out, we were going to be the only ones going on the rafting trip that afternoon. Which was just fine with us because to be honest, I’m not sure anyone would have been brave enough to be stuck with us for about four hours.
Now the first order of business once we got there was to give them our information and I’m sure we secretly signed our lives away. They are very sneaky about it in this country, but that’s alright. I’m sure we aren’t going to have any problems today. At that point we also met Alex, our other guide. He was going to be doing most of the work for us today and was getting his evaluation tomorrow. He was very sweet and we found out that he was from Seattle. It was nice to run into an American. You just never know what you are going to get in this country. Once we had been introduced to everyone, we had to get properly outfitted for our day on the river. This consisted of a full body wetsuit, a polar fleece to ear under it, an outer waterproof shell jacket, and wetsuit booties for our feet. I had been in a wetsuit recently on my swimming with dolphins adventure so I was all for the new get-up we had to get situated in. My mom and grandma on the other hand, weren’t quite as convinced as I was. We took our gear into the nearby changing room and took our time dressing ourselves in our gear. We spent a good amount of time laughing hysterically at each other and it didn’t take me long to get situated. I was able to help my mom and grandma into their wetsuits after much opposition and protesting (even from my grandma who was so gung-hoe to go rafting in the first place) and before we knew it we were in the van heading towards the river.
The Tongariro River is a man-made river based on a series of underground tunnels that have redirected the water to feed into Lake Taupo. Even though it is technically considered man-made, it is absolutely breathtaking and beautiful to look at. It didn’t take us long to get the raft down the river and we spent a good amount of time going over all of the need to knows about the raft and our trip. We learned how to properly hold the paddle, how to sit in the raft, how to not fall out of the raft and how to look like a complete dork if you fall into the boat. There were some protests and a lot of laughs along the way, but we eventually made it through Alex’s safety briefing and we pushed off onto the river.
Alex and Ryan were wonderful tour guides and we very quickly learned that we were going to be conquering a total of 64 rapids on our adventure today. We were on a grade 3 fating trip, which had some good sized rapids on it but nothing too scary or dangerous. My mom and I were at the front of the boat and my grandma was sitting behind me with Ryan. Alex had the entire back of the boat to himself which was good because he was going much of the directing and steering. We had learned how to do a forward and reverse stroke and would listen to the calls made by Alex and row accordingly. It was a beautiful afternoon and the sun was shining overhead. We managed some great conversation in between the rapids and had plenty of good laughs. There were plenty of amazing birds that we saw on the river and at one point we even rafted past one of the caves that they used in the Lord of the Rings as Golomn’s cave.
We spent about two and a half hours on the river in total and everyone survived the rapids. Amazingly, no one fell out of the boat but plenty of people fell into it. Well, mostly my mom and my grandma but I even fell in as well when we bumped one of the rock canyon walls. It was a very fun and peaceful afternoon and we all knew that we would be sore the next morning. We were treated to sandwiches once we got back to the rafting basecamp and I am pleased to report that it was much easier getting out of the wetsuits than it was getting into them. Although I must say, there was still the same level of complaining and laughing as there was earlier. Once we had had our fill of sandwiches, Ryan gave us a ride back to the lodge and we called it a night.
We had eaten the sandwiches a bit on the later side, so that became our official dinner. I still had some leftover pasta from the night before so I eventually finished that off and we enjoyed watching some TV for a while before I showered and called it a night. We were all pretty tired considering the full day of physical labor and exercise we had, so we were very happy to climb into bed at a reasonable hour and we didn’t find it very hard to fall to sleep.
WHOTSOT - what happens on tour, stays on tour 