roaring meg

Last night’s festivities made the 45-minute drive out to the river boarding place a little bit rough, but I made it in one piece. The drop-off point for river boarding is at an old gold mining center, and we got dressed in our 3-piece wetsuits (long johns, jackets and a ‘kidney belt’ since the water was so cold), fins and helmets, and were given body boards. We trekked down to the river, jumped in to the icy cold water, and had a quick lesson on river boarding survival skills, then we were off.

We were going down a section of rapids in the Kawarau River known as Roaring Meg, named after a brothel owner in the mining days who’d allegedly throw misbehaving patrons into the river. I feel sorry for them, since they didn’t have our guides (side note: one was a younger, blonde, Australian version of Pierce Brosnan, which did not help me absorb the important details of the safety lecture) to pull them back to safety whenever they got caught by the current. We went down 5 km of rapids – that’s what I’m told, at least, but I really have no idea because I was concentrating very hard on not dying. Then we had 2 km of still water to relax a little, and also to realize that water was, in fact, still icy cold even though we didn’t notice it so much when we were kicking through the rapids.

Right about when I was wondering how they manage to get a steady stream of people to pay money to do this rather than the other way around, they brought out the jetski for playtime. Now that was fun. Then we got to jump off big rocks into the river – fun, except that the height sent the water shooting straight up my nose – and go down this huge waterslide, where you’d pick up so much speed that you skim halfway across the water on the board before the current picked you up & the jetsii guy had to intervene.

I would have done the slide a few more times if it didn’t involved hauling myself out of the water and walking back up the hill – both were tough since I was pretty much numb from the cold, and I headed up to the hot showers early. It took me a good 15 minutes to get out of my life jacket, wetsuit, fins, etc. – my fingers were so cold that they couldn’t handle clips & zippers, and once they thawed out my arms were too sore to peel the layers off.

Today was Labour Day, and apparently pretty much everything closes for it, so after we got back to town it took ages to find a restaurant that was open, but we found a Thai place and Mark and I had dinner with another guy from his group who was still buzzing from his bungy jump and skydive that afternoon.