Thursday 3rd March

We both woke up in our cosy lodge room smiling at the events from the night before. We had white water rafting booked bright and early so got up and were served a full English breakfast before we had to go and get into our wet suits. It was a cold morning and we were all put into mini buses that would take us to the top of the river. Nick and I joined up with three girls from the UK who were on the kiwi experience that we'd shared the bus with. Our group leader was called Spence and he was one of the trainers who had been there the longest.

We carried the raft down onto the water and then climbed in. Nick and I were positioned with Nick front left, and I front right. We began with learning to do front and back paddle, leaning side to side onto jumping side to side, diving in and forwards and doing all kinds of moves. We gradually moved from grade 1 up to grade 5 white water rafting and it was exhilarating what we went through and how we had to work together. Each part of the river was completely unpredictable and it depended on how each boat of people worked around the rocks to how the situation turned out. Spence made it very clear that I was the best paddler out of the whole boat and kept instructing everyone to coordinate with me (my friends here will be thinking - really?!) I, being usually very non-sporty was very delighted with this and kept up the hard work. Nick couldn't hear a thing and once we were in among the rapids kept missing the cues spence was giving and was asking me "why are you down there" or over there? When we had been instructed to move!

It wasn't until half way through when Spence starting asking about us individually that we said we'd just got engaged the night before. The newly met girls were thrilled for us and spence shouted to the others going by of our news. We continued the river struggle and other boats tipped over a few times, ours only went over the once which was a purposeful me manoeuvre by spence to get us wet as we all leant on the back part of the boat and it crashed forwards into a wall and tipped over.

We all dried off afterwards and collected some pics which we all looked very interesting in...lots of awkward face pulling from scary drops and freezing water. Nick and I got changed and got a few pics of the area together before getting back into the van and driving onto Wellington. Due to the time difference we hadn't actually yet told anyone at home of our news. We had no signal in River Valley as it was so remote and by the time we had signal on Thursday it was the middle of the night in England.

We did a long 5 hour drive to Wellington and when we arrived checked in at the central basic campsite, got showered and changed and went to meet my friend Saffi, who Lauren and I had spent a lot of time with back in Laos. We met at a place called Big Mammas and we had some catching up before sharing our news and then Saffi's boyfriend Richie joined us before we all got an early night. We still hadn't shared our news with anyone from home as we'd had no signal during the time we were at River Valley with how remote it was and then decided to wait until the morning to make the many phone calls!

xxx