20
Location: Tully River
After another night at the motel, we woke up bright and early at 5:45 am to be picked up for our white water rafting trip on the Tully River. We were given banana yellow thermal tops, life jackets and helmets because, as I said before, our group is prone to hurting ourselves and needs as much protection as possible. Walking down to the water a famous Alexa screech could be heard; yes, she had fallen once again. The group split in two, 6 in each boat. Christy, Joe, Alexa, Keeley, Riley, our tour guide Darcy, and I started a rivalry against the other raft of ActionQuesters. There was a drizzle, but we didn’t mind, it was a nice break from the sun. The rapids were amazing, even though Darcy had said he had never seen the river water so low before which meant a lot of ridiculous jumping up and down (we learned a move called the jig-a-lig) due to lots of exposed rocks. Everyone looked so funny, and we couldn’t stop laughing especially when Alexa would joke with Darcy about it being his fault we were stuck. Whenever we would pass the other boat (Rowan, Jenna, Lily, Daisy, Jeb, Meredith and their guide Fuji), we would splash at each other and claim we were with the better guide. Daisy, Meredith, Lily, Riley, and Joe were jumping off the front during the calm parts of the river. At one point, Riley went to stick his head in the water and ended up falling out completely. Another time we attempted to wait for the next rafts behind us. Darcy couldn’t stop us, and we almost lost him as we tumbled backward down the next set of rapids, our boat filling with water to the point where we thought it might sink. We stopped and had a lunch of burgers and sausage at the water’s edge. Alexa somehow managed to fall again on the slippery rocks. Towards the end of our adventure, we jumped off a small 15ft cliff. The water was not on the warm side but was refreshing. We went under a small waterfall while embracing one another in a group hug as the water’s force pelted down on us. We had to cut the journey short to 10km of the river due to the water level being too low to continue after the dam upstream got stopped. After a long bus ride back to Cairns, we took quick showers and got dressed for our last dinner at Cafe Thailand. We closed the night off with one last squeeze and packed our bags for the final time. We have to leave for the airport at 3 am so the rest of the night will probably be a sleepless one, spent reminiscing on the amazing memories we have made these past three weeks.
P.s. Our cameras and phones were stowed away throughout the rafting adventure, and today we completely forgot to take photos! Here’s a post-squeeze group selfie with 1/4 of Joe on end!