Rafting (aka. being social in the context of nature) =)

As I mentioned last week, I went white water rafting with with people from the lab I work at. From seeing videos (and from my own imagination) – I was scared shitless. Somehow, going down a fast river in a blow-up raft while crashing into rocks just didn’t seem like a safe activity… especially considering my mediocre swimming skills.

But I thought it would be a good activity for several reasons:

1. to get outside Montreal downtown, and to see some of the landscapes of Quebec. The place we went to is Eau Vive, which is located on the Riviere Rouge, about 2 hours north-west of montreal. Driving out was really beautiful – the area is green and hilly, and I felt like we were getting into the footholds of the a mountain…
2. to push my self a bit by doing something  with people who are not in my regular social group. While I met a lot of new people during my first and second years of undergrad, over the past two years I’ve mostly been hanging out with the same group of friends. While I deeply love my friends, I’ve gotten to know them very well, and we seem to often do the same kinds of things every week. Meeting people (and doing new things) gives me a different kind of energy, and I miss having the chance to get to know more diverse personalities on a regular basis. The graduate and post-doc students I work with are all from very different places and backgrounds, and it was great getting to know more about them.
3. to push myself even more, and do something which sounds dangerous (or at the very least – painful), but which may increase my appreciation for nature. Once on the raft, the whole experience wasn’t nearly as scary as I had imagined it to be. True, the waters were rough, and we got completely soaked and fell into the river on several occasions, but the helmets and life-vests they provided us with reassured me. In fact, what was the most fun was falling off the raft and feeling the strength of the river wash me down a bit. Struggling to swim back to the boat with paddle in hand and rapids gushing around you was a hundred times more exhilarating that just sitting passively on the raft!

See below for pictures:

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ps. Our guide (the guy in the back) had one of the most awesome beards Ive ever seen..all held together by an elastic. If I had to rate it on this scale (by Matt McInterney, posted earlier), I’d say it’s somewhere in between ‘the philosopher’, ‘the unkempt’, and ‘warewolf’. Probably closest to warewolf.

~ by niinik on June 15, 2010.