Quick catch up on the last week or so...

• Spent a few days recovering from Mt Kenya climb in Nairobi finding out where some random muscles were that I'd never felt before
• Picked up my mother from the airport, quite a crazy thing to be randomly in Africa and be able to show someone around when they arrive... introduced her to the fruit salad place around the corner where she became a regular like myself...
• Went to the giraffe centre in karen where we hand fed giraffes (got covered in saliva but its an antiseptic so obviously a good thing...)
• Went to the Toy market (not actually toys but clothes etc) which was in some very odd place. Luckily we came out alive and with much fuller bags than before. Well, my bag was bursting, but you can find things like Marks and Spencer shirts for 50 shillings (about 1 NZ dollar).
• Mum headed off to My Kenya and I went on a lovely 8 hour bus journey to Kisumu in Western kenya... lets just say that it was a very very very very very long 8 hours on a butt breaking road and in a body squishing, chlostrophobicly hot and smelly, rickety, roof leaking, loud fuzzy radio blasting bus...
• In the few days from Kenya to Uganda I travelled by the afore mentioned bus, 3 wheeled tuk tuk, a matatu (mini bus) with 14 seats and 22 people, by foot at the border with my heavy bag when I thought I would 'stretch my legs' by walking for about half and hour before numerous yells of 'muzungu' made me realise I was completely in the wrong direction so I got a ride on a bicycle (pack and all) to be put in a taxi (minibus in Uganda) where I waited for about 2 hours inhaling the dust and melting from the heat before bumping our way to Jinja where I sat on the back of a motorbike and zoomed off to the backpackers where the next day I stood in the back of a huge truck pulling rafts before sitting in the raft and occasionally 'swimming' (aka bailing from the raft) and finally getting a ride in a friends car (seatbelts, leg room, air conditioning and all!) to Kampala... phew!

If someone had told me a month ago that I would white water raft down the Nile I would have told them to stop riding in matatus cos it was shaking their brains out... but actually it was one of the most fun things I've ever done!

In my raft was Joseph from Kenya, Molly from Washington DC, Sophie from England, Agnus from New York, Dave from Australia, Nora from Germany, our Ugandan guide Paulo and me. Quite a mix! We spent the first fifteen minutes or so learning how to paddle, flip the raft, get back in the raft, get out from under the raft when it flips, get down in the raft when getting thrashed about by rapids etc

The sun was shining and the water was warm, birds were diving for fish and fortunately the Nile crocs were not in these parts of the river... we rafted about 30 km including the Big Four - monsterous grade 5 rapids with names like Rib Cage, Silverback, Flying Squirrel and finally Itanda (the Bad Place).

There is nothing quite like paddling crazily into super fast moving crashing water before hearing our guide yell "down and hold", where we scramble ungracefully to sit down in the raft and hold (knuckle whitening tightly) to the rope around the edge. Most of the time it didn't matter how hard you held on as once the raft flips everyone falls out. This can involve ending up under the raft (very disorientating!), getting wacked with flying paddles (your meant to hold on to them but easier said then done) and getting rescued by waiting kayakers (reassuring as 3 of them were kiwis) before being very roughly hauled back onto the raft by the shoulders of your life jacket (this can be painful if like me you get hauled face first into a pile of oars that smack you right on the nose...) and this stage you quickly grab your paddles and off you go again!

Our raft was great fun, lots of laughing and heaps of sunscreen applications as the sun is cruel at the Equator. A bit of Aussie vs Kiwi rivalry resulted in me getting pushed off the raft but getting my revenge back at a later time (Aussies are very entertaining when they are made to do unprepared belly flops!).

Getting out to walk to raft around the grade 6 part of Itanda we were given the option of getting out their or braving the Bad Place and the Other Place... a good deal of peer pressure on all parts meant our full raft headed off through both holes (where the chance of you staying in is next to none) and with some crazy luck ended up at the still water, very wet, missing a paddle but all still in (we tried to tell ourselves it was skill...), where we then watched the other rafts flipping and flying upside down after us.

Free beer (Nile beer of course) and a truck ride back to the barbeque, exhausted and looking like slightly burnt drowned ratswas a perfect way to finish a fantastic day!