Survival Camp Day 2

(An example of how it looked like when we were white water canoeing)

Today we would be working a record in all of VY because we were going to do everything that took people 2 days to do within a day. Intense eh? So today, we got our canoes but with some difficulty. We had to hide behind the trees as they were dropping off the canoes because all of us were asians and they were white. It was hard to say that we are a family so we hid there for like an hour. Finally with our canoes, we started paddling around for a bit before we arrived we had face the rapids!!! It is a 3 person canoe and I was at the back steering us around. Thank god there was no mosquitoes as we paddled since we were in the middle of the river. We got to a mini kind of rapid where it was fast waters and we got up it to get an experience of how white water feels like. Unfortunately we flipped our canoe because we weren't balanced and it was saddening to be one of the few groups that flipped. Even like middle speed water was pretty fast when you were in it especially when your in a canoe. It was balance that you needed.

As we got close to a rapid or a mini waterfall, our guides told us to portage over it because the water level was too high and we would actually die if we went through. So it took like 1 hour before we can move all the canoes down the hill and into the water again. Tough work!! Then he made us all jump into the bottom of the waterfall. That is something that I have never done before. As I jumped into the waterfall, I was pushed down and with the help of the lifejacket, I did not sink and the currents pushed me along. It was amazing because it pushed us in the shape of a U. from the right side of the U to the left. It was amazing!!!!!!!! And then he gave us a challenge which was to move everyone across the rapids within 15 minutes. We had ropes and a lot of hands and it took a great deal of work before we were all able to cross the rapids. With the fast currents pushing along us, one of us had barely been able to hold on to the rope and almost was lost within the rapids. Thank god our guides were behind us and able to save her before she floated away. There were many rocks below and she would have been hurt in the process. We were successful with the challenge and we moved on to the next.

We finally came to a rapid that we could take on with the canoe. Unfortunately, as we got on the canoe, we were not balance and flipped within a second and we washed aways with all our belongings and canoe. We capsized twice already and we needed to redeem ourselves or else all our dignity was gone! We came across a few more minor rapids and we didn't capsize anymore with experience to our previous failures. Kind of happy from that but we had to paddle for like 10 hours which was never done before in VY history. 10 hours of paddling inside a canoe can definitely get your arms and legs sore.

When we built our campsite that night, all of us were sound asleep at 10PM and we didn't have a nice dinner because all of us were starving but we did not have enough food. We had bak choi but everyone refused to eat it because you had to do #2 from it. Therefore it started to rot the next day.