I'm not really sure when or how it happened, but at some point in the not too distant past, I think I grew up...sort of. So when the other volunteers went out to the clubs on Friday night, Kim and I watched movies on our iPads. I made it 23 minutes into some cheesy chick flick before I was out cold, while the other volunteers, who still know how to party, rolled into the house around 4:30 am.
As it turns out it was probably for the best that a couple of us were functioning on a full night's sleep because we needed to be out of the house by 8:30 to make it to our rafting adventure. At 8:07 I hesitantly knocked on the door of the girl who had been out all night. In response, I got a groan. I knock again. "Mumble, mumble, groan, groan." It's now 8:09, so I decide to be a bit more aggressive. I open the door, and the girl (who for the next couple minutes we will refer to as drunkie) is still groaning at me. Eventually drunkie realized that I was in her room and popped out of bed. We somehow managed to get to the travel agency early. However, I cannot say so much for drunkie's partner in crime from the night before, who literally ran to meet us after we gave her a wakeup call. This little delay led to us all running down the street with our tour guide like a bunch of weirdos. Children and adults alike were clearly confused by the stampede of gringos running down the street.
Surprisingly, we did make our bus, and after two hours of winding through beautiful mountains, we made it to the rio, where we got to dress up like Scuba Steve. Okay, maybe the only similarity was that we were wearing wetsuits, but it was my first time in a wetsuit, so I felt like Scuba Steve.
I somehow lost the nose-goes game and ended up in the front of the raft. I'm normally all about sitting in the front, but the water was straight from a glacier, and sitting in the front also meant getting splashed a lot! Surprisingly, after the initial splash, I wasn't too cold. I didn't realize this at the time, but it was because my body was numb. Numb or not, the trip down river was amazing. The views were like nothing I've ever seen before. There were plenty of decent rapids that merited wearing a helmet, so we all got to feel pretty badass.
After rafting, all 20 of us piled into a sauna. Let me tell you, if you want to feel really close to strangers really fast, stripping down to your underwear (or one piece swimming suit that you stole from your mother in my case) and sitting in a hot, dark room is the way to do it. They gave us warm lunch and had a zip line for one more adventure for those that were not too cold and exhausted to climb up a tower and slide above the river.
After a day of adventure, my guidebook led us to a cozy hookah bar with the best pisco sours in town.
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