Day 167 - Rolling on the river.

Queenstown is a bit of a conundrum.


Dah dah dah dah (No countdown SFX, thanks).

There are tons of things to do but not many of them fall in the “under $20 range”. Most of them are high adrenaline and thus high costing!

So before I left Canada that I would pick two unique things that I wanted to do and for the most part, couldn’t do back home.

The first of those would be done on this day – riversurfing! Which is, in a nutshell, white water rafting without the raft.

After a short ride out to what, if memory serves, is Lake Wanaka, it was time to get kitted up.

Nothing says excitement on a Saturday morning like rental wetsuits and soaking boots.
EXCITEMENT.

We walked down the hill and got our briefing by the guides. We were first asked to jump in the water!

We then practiced the basic moves – kicking upstream and downstream, duck diving, barrel rolling and getting back on your board once you had fell off.

We then started on our trek. One thing I noticed right off the start – due to the shorter fins, as compared to my dive fins, every single fin kick (save for the flutter) that I had learned in diving became absolutely useless. Goodbye sculling. See you later, frog kick.

At one point we stopped and watched someone jumped off the original bungy bridge. And when

I say original, I do mean original. Queenstown is the world’s birthplace of bungy jumping. We, as riversurfers, did our own jump.

Not bad!
One of the most challenging goes was actually trying to float downstream, then turn upstream, and hope to heck that you’d be grabbed by one of the guides (in this case, Neil the Scot). Here’s my first attempt:

So close! If I had only kicked a bit more… Sadly attempt number two of two was worse. I was making great time and pace… and then my leg cramped up – and just that bit made me miss the wave. Out damn cramp, out.
Near the end we hit “Chinese Dog Leg”. When given instructions for this rapid it became something to the context of “go left, go left, duck dive, go left, duck dive, go right, eat a hokey pokey”. Close enough. I managed to get through. So did my new friends Torsten and Kristiana from Cologne (hello, Gunter Jauch!).


All in all a great day out, but one that was very physically demanding. Having to arch your back like that insane lotus position for yoga became something that my body didn’t like.

I went back to Butterfli and took it easy… meeting up with Torsten and Kristiana after their canyon swing adventures to exchange addresses. Torsten said to me “Have you had dinner yet?” Actually at this point I had just finished getting some pasta to make at home, but I figured what the hell let’s go for dinner.

Aaaaaaaaaaand back it was to Fergburger! Why not. Actually it was quite different than the night before, as we this time took the meal and sat and chatted at the water front. Which was actually great. It was wonderful swapping stories. I’m enjoying meeting such great people – I wish that they would be around when I got home to Canada!

Following a stop at Lick’s (the ice cream place, not the Ontario based burger joint) we parted.

What a great day, once again.
Cheers
Vick.