Kicking Back In Krabi (2/3)

DAY THREE

Woke up again at 7am to get ready for our white-water rafting trip. It was a long 1.5hr drive deep into the jungle to the rafting site.

Once there, I was pretty impressed by the lodge that seemed to have sprung up out of nowhere in the middle of the jungle. It was huge and very well-maintained.

We went for a quick tutorial (which basically consisted of three points: get in, stay in and try not to fall out of the raft - and if you do, for heaven's sake, don't panic!!). Apparently, if we fell out of the raft, we were supposed to just float and go with the water current and stay calm. Don't worry. One of the guys will paddle over to you and grab you by your lifesaver and pull you back into the raft. Oh, I see. Just go with the flow ah? Then no need to worry lor - are you people crazy??!!

So there we were: dragging our raft down to the River of Death. The damn raft was heavy ok.

And there we were: pushing ourselves away from the bank of the River of Death.

And there we were: RAFTING! I paddled really hard and it took me about two minutes to realise that it didn't matter whether I paddled or not because the raft was being expertly manoeuvred by the two guides who were positioned at the front and back of the um, mode of transportation. Those guys were remarkably strong and handled the raft really well as we sped through the rapids, which left me plenty of time to scream my head off and freak out like some crazy person.

The good news - I never fell out of the raft into the raging rapids even when the guides were playing the fool and steering our raft right into the rocks to topple us over ($#@%!@#$!@#). All in all, it was lots of fun ... and I would never ever do it again. Once was enough thank-you-very-much.

We had lunch after our leisurely cruise down the River of Death, then departed to trek up a hill to a waterfall and end our day with a visit to the Monkey Temple.

The trek up to the waterfall was easy enough but man, it was crowded up there!! Plus, the water was soooo cold ... too cold to do any swimming. We trekked back down after a while.

As for the temple, I confess I'm not exactly a big fan of temples and even less so of banana-chugging monkeys. So this particular stop held little fascination for me. I realise that this makes me sound like an Ignorant Tourist, but all I saw were monkeys, monkeys and more monkeys. And why not? There were 1,400 of them all over the place!!!

Of course there weren't only monkeys, there was a big statue of Buddha and a cave. There were quite a few dogs roaming around freely too, and they'd sometimes chase the monkeys. The dogs scared me, so we went back to the hotel.

For Day Four, click here.