Rafting and Bungee-ing

So the rafting company collected us on time and we arrived by the banks of the Nile by 9:30. By 10:00 we were briefed, sun-creamed, life-jacketed and sitting in our raft ready to go. Our rafting guide was Mary-Lou from Canada, and she was great – very experienced and professional, but nice and relaxed and chatty. The Nile is supposed to be (according to the guidebook anyway) one of the best rafting rivers in the world, but for me it didn’t compare to the Kali Gandaki in Nepal. Here the rapids are very widely spaced out, so you go through a rapid or two and then have a rest for a bit before the next set of rapids come up. But it was a still a great day out, and we did manage a few grade 5’s and managed to flip the raft twice.

Poor Sarah got a bit of a fright the first time the raft flipped, but the guide took great care of her and she was never in any danger at all – at one point the guide had Sarah by the shoulders and was shouting to her that everything was OK, and that she could open her eyes and breath – Sarah thought she was still under water when in fact she was floating along nicely on the surface, she just had her eyes shut so tight!

When we got back to the rafting campsite we discover that we could stay the night free, since we had done a full days rafting. The campsite was really nice and the setting was beautiful, on a high ledge looking down onto the Nile itself, so we decided to stay there instead of trying to get accommodation in Jinga town. It also meant we could do the bungee jump they have right there in the camp too, although we had to wait until the following morning, as they were wrapping up for the evening when we got back from the rafting. I wasn't particularly pushed about doing the bungee (having done one years ago), but Sarah was keen to give it a try (especially as they offered the option of doing a tandem), and of course I'm always really keen to encourage everyone to face and conquer their fears.

So the next morning I have a big fried breakfast before doing the bungee. We decided to go for the tandem option, although at first I thought it was cheaper than doing a jump each, but in fact it wasn’t. But Sarah felt more comfortable with a tandem so we just went ahead with that. We had to wait for a couple of English lads to do jumps first, but that was good because we could see how it all worked, and also see that they were both fine (or course!) and see that they both really loved it. The South African guy running the bungee was great, really professional and explained everything clearly. There are a few differences when doing a tandem – you have to stand side-by-side but then turn your upper body to face one another, and make sure we embraced each other tightly – if we let go we might split apart and then crash back together again, possibly smashing our heads together, which would have been rather nasty. As it happens, embracing someone next to you is a pretty natural reaction when you’re terrified, so that part wasn’t a problem at all.

We had the option of having our heads dunked in the Nile if we wanted, so obviously that was a given – I wasn’t going to have any Negator whinging on that one! The actual jump itself was all a bit weird – very different from the first jump I did years ago in Waterford with Mullins and Doherty. With that one you get to look at the horizon and see the ground rushing towards you, but on a tandem your kinda forced to just stare at your partner’s eyes, and so you don’t see anything really. It still had the same disorienting feeling when you start bouncing back upwards though, and the water dunking was pretty cool.

But straight after the jump I felt quite queasy, and about half and hour later, in the shower, I threw up. I think it was a combination of things really – the greasy breakfast, the fact that I swallowed a gob-full of the Nile on impact, the obvious fear factor but also the fact that the first thing to smack into the water was the top of my head. When I chatted with the two English lads who jumped before us, they said that they were told that the most important thing for them to remember was to keep their hands extended above their heads as they hit the water, so as to protect their heads from the impact. Obviously I couldn’t do that as I was grasping onto Sarah. Anyway, after a half hour resting in bed I was grand, and so we took out bicycles to ride the few kilometers into Jinga town to check it out.

It’s actually a nice little town, and I managed to have a quick peek at the plague that marks the supposed source of the Nile (after skipping around the ticket desk by following a local lad along a cross-country dirty track, since I was on a bike). After a nice lunch in the town we headed back to the campsite, as the two English bungee-jumping lads had offered us a lift back to Kampala in the car they’d hired for their holiday.

Getting a lift back into Kampala was a nice and handy treat. The lads were staying in the Sheraton Hotel and so I decided to check to see if we could just stay there too (we never did find a nice cheap guesthouse in Kampala). It was very pricey for what it was, but I decided to stay anyway as we’d agreed to head out with the English lads to Haandi, the local Indian restaurant we’d been to before.

The next day we headed down to Entebbe to check it out and to catch our flight that evening to Nairobi. I didn’t have much time to check out Entebbe, as I decided to make the most of the Sheraton’s breakfast and their pool, steam room and sauna, but I did manage to have a couple of hours running around the Uganda Wildlife Education Centre, while Sarah waited in the restaurant of a nearby hotel. It’s basically just a zoo, but you can get up close and personal with many of the animals, and like most of the places we’ve been so far, it was nice and quite with very few people about. I was petting rhinos and could have played with the otters, and again I could have stayed there all day, as it was just so peaceful and chilled out. But I had to leave, pick up Sarah and get a motorbike taxi (with both of us and our rucksacks on the one small moped again) to the airport and from there back to Nairobi.