We spent Australia Day travelling, so once we arrived at the Mission. Beach bus terminal, we were looking forward to chilling out.
The hostel - Jackaroo - was a 15 minute shuttle bus journey away.
It was a lovely hostel, but in all honesty we just sat in the big common room and watched films, then went to bed. There was no air con though so sleeping was GREAT FUN. We could barely stand in the room for longer than 5 minutes.

This morning we got up and ready to be picked up by Raging Thunder at 7.40am. We headed off to meet at a pub, sign our waiver forms and borrow shoes (we had only brought things, thankfully we could hire ones!) and headed off.

We were rafting down the Tully River, but once again I turned into a big s***e bag so I watched everyone get kitted up and head off. There were two groups - an extreme and a more tame haha. Of course we had been booked onto the extreme, meaning our small group of 22 would be split into rafts of 5 and 6 people, rafting a farther distance, BEING FLIPPED UPSIDE DOWN, etc. Hence the idea to give it a swift change of mind....
It was absolutely POURING down. Wet season in Northern Queensland is insane, but according to the Raging Thunder crew, this meant great things for us as the rivers hadn't had much rainfall so there wasn't many waterfalls etc. After one night they were in full flow!

The bus driver took me down to the spot where we would have lunch and showed me the 'rapids' where everyone would be coming down. I had to trek through a wee rainforest to see and it brought me out at this big open part of the Tully River that had loads of rocks and a huge waterfall - so so pretty!
Our group leader, Dave asked me if I wanted to join in and if I really didn't like it, there was a stop I could get off 20 minutes later. I don't enjoy being the friend that misses out on things, but sometimes it's harder to force myself into this crap haha so I agreed and off we went.

All in all..... I had a ball! However, we did get tipped upside down - it happened a fair bit and was pretty unpredictable. There was a few times random people randomly fell out and it was horrible to see. Especially when it happened when we were going over rapids; there's massive rocks everywhere and you had to try keep yourself in the boat, the waters flowing so fast and you have to find the person who went overboard and pull them into the boat using their life jacket! So stressful! I've got no idea how the crew do it haha but Dave made me feel much better! I actually had FUN!
The grade 4 rapids were the scariest. But paddling and floating along the calm waters amongst waterfalls and beautiful lush scenery made it totally worthwhile. Unfortunately I've got no photographs as the groups got theirs taken before lunch which I didn't participate in :(

Seeing the lush rain forests and waterfalls has made me SO excited for the trips we have in Cairns, which is the next stop...........