Chiang Mai, Thailand - River Rafting

The minivan picked John, Kyle and I up about 9:30 a.m. to travel to the Mae Tang River for river rafting. The A/C in the van was broken, but with windows open, it wasn't a bad 2-hour trip to the put in. The last part of the road was dirty and muddy. It paralleled the river. We had to stop a couple of times to maneuver around people taking elephant rides. I guess it was deemed a multi-use highway.

Our guide was a small Thai man named Dang. He was very cheerful and spoke the little English he knew, related to what needed to know about rafting, very well. The commands were:

"On the job!" - meaning get into standard paddling positions
"In the boat" - we're going over something big, duck into the boat and hold on for dear life!

As well as the standard:

Paddle, 1,2,1,2,...
Backpaddle
Left forward, right back...
etc.

The river was abnormally high, and though normally classed grade 4, a couple of the rapids were at least grade 4+ and probably a solid grade 5. Dang had us practice maneuvers well ahead of the big rapids. Even so, the first set of rapids was a shock. We rounded a corner and all of sudden the bottom dropped out of the river. We saw the treeline framed by a horizontal edge of water that looked like the top of a dam. At the top of the "dam" all we could see was a jumbled mass of boulders with water swirling around them forming waves, hydraulics and whirlpools with fallen trees strewn in between.

Dang deftly commanded and maneuvered us around the obstacles with only one of our paddlers losing a paddle in the process. A young Thai boy dove into the turbulent water above the next set of rapids to retreive it and hand it back to us.