Our first leg on the Oz Experience bus took us to Mission Beach. Tom had decided to return to Sydney and work for a few months before travelling the coast, so our group now consisted of myself, Martin, Fiona, Jaime and Stacey. Martin and I were not in the best of conditions for travelling after our visit to the Woolshed, but soon became a little more lively after a short walk through the rainforest to break-up the drive.
Fi, Martin and I were booked into the same hostel, Scotty’s, which was very laid-back and had a nice restaurant/bar next door. I had booked a day of whitewater rafting on the nearby Tully river, and Jaime and Stacey wanted to jump out of an aeroplane, but Martin and Fi had no intentions of doing anything like that and quickly exhausted all that Mission Beach has to offer. It is quite a nice beach, but really, it’s just a beach. They left for Magnetic Island on the bus the next afternoon!
My rafting trip wasn’t until Sunday, so I took Saturday to organise and confirm the dates of my Open Water Dive course and sailing trip around the Whitsunday Islands. Early the next morning I was picked-up by the bus and taken out to the river. There were 6 rafts going out on the river that day, with 6-8 people in each. My raft had the full 8 people, including a frail-looking woman in her early-sixties, who it turns out still enjoys snowboarding in New Zealand and had rafted the same stretch of river almost 25 years ago!
I was told by our guide that rapids are graded from 1 to 6, where 6 is something that will almost certainly kill you in a raft. In fact he also said that it is difficult to even attempt grade 6 rapids in a raft, as a grade 6 is downgraded to a grade 5 as soon as it is successfully completed by a rafting crew! The rapids on this stretch of the Tully river were generally grade 4.
Surprisingly, I didn’t fall out of the raft once. I did have a few close calls, but somehow managed to pull myself back in by hooking my feet into the sides of the raft! By the end of the day though, I was ready to get out of the water. Sitting on an inflatable rubber boat and being washed down a river is far more tiring than it looks!
