Exploring The Globe One Step At A Time: March 2014

Thursday, March 13, 2014

The mighty Zambezi

Today we explore the might Zambezi river, which is the fourth largest river on the continent, but some of the best white water rafting in the world...and of course, because we are such risk takers we are exploring it while paddling in a raft down those rapids in the gorge. I am not sure that any of us will ever forget this day. We began in the morning by going to the tour company for a briefing on how dangerous these rapids actually are..we would be traversing everything from a grade one through grade five rapids. Then we took a 45 minute jeep ride in order to get to the TOP of the gorge...they failed to mention that we would have to hike over 800 feet STRAIGHT down the gorge to the river...which means that we were also going to have to hike over 800 feet out of the gorge. There was a very unstable path that took us nearly an hour to hike down, when we arrived at the bottom we were quickly briefed on river safety and placed into the rafts. Immediately we learned paddling, and then had to jump out of the rafts into the water to learn how to act When (not if) we fall out of the raft. We also were taught how to pull each other in the rafts...then it was off to the rapids, we have quite a few girls who don't/can't swim and one of them was the first to pop right out of the raft into the rapids.

Recent and Future Travels

So recently I travelled to Zambi and got engaged so I want to share a few highlights from the trip and hopefully warm up for the next big move around Southern Africa. I am co-leading a study abroad in May again with eleven students from Ohio State University...we are traveling to Zimbabwe and South Africa and then when they return to the US I will continue on to Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, and possibly Namibia.