After talking about this for 3 years, today was finally going to be the day where I go to the Grand Canyon... ... the BOTTOM of it that is! :)
The plan today - wake up, grab the complimentary breakfast, then in baller style take a yellow school bus down to the bottom of the grand canyon, where we'd be meet with our tour guide who would take us on the Colorado River on a metal motor boat, going through the rapids. Lunch at the bottom of the canyon, then if the weather holds up, we would get helicoptered back up, or if it doesn't, spend 2 more hours in the river... where a greyhound would meet us to bring us back.
So lots of side stories for this one, enough to qualify the trip back into a soldier/refugee trip...
After boarding the yellow school bus, we begin our descent. Having woken up so early in the day, dozed off for most of the bus ride. Woke up towards the end, to see just how far down we were into the canyon (4000 ft I think was what they said). It was pretty cool as the drive went on, I would see trickles of water, and eventually building up into a river... which meant we were there!
The white water rafting experience was really nice. It was a different kind in that there was no paddling involved, nor inflatable rafts. It was instead a metal motor boat, and at that point I realized that it probably won't be too crazy because... well, the metal boat wasn't padded! It would really hurt if someone would go overboard, since they would be bound to hit some piece of metal on the way down.
So after putting our stuff in the dry bag, we headed off. The first few rapids definitely was... refreshing... haha. It was pretty hot, and so it was really nice to be drenched with water.
After a couple rapids, we stopped by and got out onto an island where there was a waterfall. It was pretty cool as we got to stand right underneath it and make stupid poses... lol.
Then onwards to more rapids. In the last rapid, the boat operator let loose and finally went through the eye of the rapid, so it was consecutive rounds of boat up, boat down. Previously he had been taking it easy because there's a 8 year kid on the boat, so he was being nice. But this last one was really fun. The only bad part was the lady next to me, on the 2nd up and down, flew into me. While this prevented her from sliding further, it also made me loose my grip on the metal railing... and my wrist went BAM, into the metal corner. That'd hurt :(. My wrist would have a little bruise because of it. Grrrrr...
We ended up through 8 rapids in total, and lots of pictures (including my $7 underwater camera) and videos were taken. These will be posted once I get my hands on them.
Overall, it was pretty awesome so far. We were at the bottom of the grand canyon, hitting rapids and getting wet. Went on land deep inside the Grand Canyon, played in waterfalls. The scenery was just spectacular, and definitely a totally different perspective than from up top. After lunch, we continued to go down river.
As a part of this down river ride to the helicopter pads, I finally got my chance and jumped into the river. Yes, I didn't jump in the Nile because it was diiiirty, but now I can say that I swam in the BOTTOM of Grand Canyon! :). A check mark well worth the hypothermia I could have gotten if I was left in the water for maybe a minute longer... haha. The only thing though was I wished that the down current was a little bit stronger, so that I can really float down the river just like that time in the Ottawa River.
The other cool thing was that we were actually boating away from a storm! We actually cut our lunch short so that we can be avoid of a looming storm. By looming, I meant that half the sky behind us was black, and the other half (the side we were in, was blue and white. It was a really cool sight. What was also scary/interesting is that we saw lighting touch down on a part of the canyon... in front of us!!! (yes, we were in a metal boat, with water all around us). The lighting actually caused the spot it hit to smoke up. Too bad we didn't capture it on camera. But yea, storm was looming.
Rushing away from the storm, we see helicopters flying off and thought: "sweet, we would get this complete experience". But turns out it wasn't meant to me :(. as we continued down the the various helipads, we started seeing that those helicopters weren't for us... and this is where the trip that Hoola Hoola had organized started to go slightly downhill. Originally if we got on them... it'd be an easy perfect score for them, and I would recommend this trip to anyone and everyone who goes to the Grand Canyon. But alas, the story shall unfold such that the Hoola Hoola organized trip deserves only a score of 75 because of its poor finish. More on the next entry... .. .
Note: Pictures to come... need to develop the film and get the pictures and videos from others
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