River bugging!

     I know right about now you are asking yourself, what the hell is river bugging?  This was the essential question that I was asking the night before I did it. River bugging is basically a special way of tubing. You are given an individual raft that you float down the river in. BUT you are wearing a full wet suit, life jacket, helmet flippers, and these strange webbed gloves. The idea of course being that their webbedness will help you paddle and move faster. It's basically an opportunity for you to pretend that you are a water skipper.
     I went with a group of friends, most of who are South African. It took us three different buses to finally arrive at this place, but once we got there it was totally worth it. The water was gorgeous and river bugging is a lot of fun! We of course got a quick lesson on how to be a river bug. Most of which was retarded common sense water knowledge. They literally told us that if your face is in the water you need to turn over so it's out of the water. Then, they made use practice this. They also told us that we should not hit our heads on the rocks. The only useful part of the training was when they made us purposefully capsize our river bugs and then get out from underneath it.
     All in all I was a fairly good river bugger! I did capsize once in a particularly rugged part of the river and it took me an unpleasantly long amount of time to get myself righted, but I lived to tell the tale! I had a blast and will hopefully go again next year!

This is not a video of my group, but it still gives you an idea of what we did!

The lovely river and the red school bus we rode in.

River bugs and the webbed gloves!

The beginning of our lesson.

Still learning...we're almost in the water!

The person in front is practicing how not to drown. Oh yeah... you don't leave your face submerged in water until you run out of air!