Be Careful for What You Wish or How I Went White Water Rafting as Part of a Balinese Hotel Staff Retreat

I paid my $39 and was told to sit in a group of chairs close to the parking lot. There seemed to be a group together there, and I felt my socially awkward tendencies rearing their ugly head. 

I didn’t necessarily want to sit alone, but I felt like somehow I was intruding on this group of Balinese folks, most of whom were wearing a black shirt that all read the same logo – In search of Ultimum. I didn’t know what Ultimum was, and I wasn’t totally sure that they really wanted me in their space; plus I wasn’t positive that I hadn’t just taken one of their group’s seats as there seemed to be quite a lot of them. So hard to be in my head sometimes. 

Of course, had I known that I was the one singleton at the TOEKAT Rafting agency, and that regardless of what they or I wanted, we would be spending the next two hours navigating the Ayung River together, I might have inquired if they spoke English before we all piled into the van together. 

But I was still feeling misanthropic, so I sat there alternately trying to guess the wifi code in the agency and staring off into space. Then the guide, a "cool" Balinese man in his mid 40s with a pony tail and an earring, wearing  a rash guard waved us over to a set of vans and into two vans the fourteen of us went. 

Immediately, the guide began talking to me and only me in English, “So where you from?” “First time in Bali?” “Where your husband?” “You come alone?” I had gotten to expect this line of questioning, but felt awkward by his blatant disregard of the other five guests in the van. They, however, didn’t seem to mind and the girl next to me struck up her own conversation in Indonesian when she decided the time was right. 

We drove for twenty minutes out of town into what seemed like the jungle,  and got out of the van to choose our life vests, helmets (what had I gotten myself into?) and paddles. The guide joked that I could stay with him, and insisted on touching my shoulder every time he said it and then laughed, “just kidding.” No that wasn’t too annoying. 

When it was time for our group picture in front of the rice field we would walk through to get to the hundreds of steps we would go down to get to the river’s edge, I hung back. I was pretty positive they didn’t need me in their picture. An older man waved me over and smiled. “Come on! We take a picture.” And so there I was smiling along side of everyone else with my dorky helmet and life vest. 

We walked as a group slowly down the hundreds of awkwardly sized stone steps to reach the water’s edge. The older man filled me in on the fact that the group worked at a hotel in Ubud, Purem something or other and that this was a staff bonding retreat. 

I joked that they were so happy I came along, but that was possibly lost in translation, as they just smiled and said of course they were. 

We reached the edge of the river just in time to see the assistants pumping up the rafts and putting the plugs in to keep them afloat. 

We jumped on the rafts after a quick photo and immediately the two girls in my group went right to the back. The boys joined them in the center which left me right up front. I tried to remember what was more dangerous in class 3 rapids, but at that moment, it felt a little like a moot point. So instead, I listened as the guide gave us the thirty second rafting lesson. “Mayor” meant paddle forward. “Madur” meant back paddle and surprisingly “Stop” meant stop. I said the words aloud a few times to try to remember them and tried not to feel awkward when the boat cracked up and said a bunch of things I didn’t understand. I mean what were the chances that they were talking about me, right?

The other two boats had already taken off with the rest of the group so we pushed off and joined them. “Mayor,” the guide instructed and forward we went. Now to be quite honest, the white water rafting wasn’t the most intense I’ve ever done and I am anything but expert (see my earlier post about surfing and all things requiring physical prowess), but the experience of being in the Ayung river in the middle of a jungle gorge was something else. 

The water was a murky brown and the stone walls of the gorge shot up hundreds of feet on either side of us, covered in jungle plants, hanging leaves, strangely formed trees and sections of the stone that seemed to be carved into a story of animals, buddhas and people. 

Later, when I asked the guide about the carvings, he laughed saying that a hotel had done them about ten years earlier, but had made them to look as if they were thousands of years old. Capitalism rears its ugly head again, of course this time, you couldn’t see tell it was ugly since it was so artfully carved. 

Our job as a group, of course, was to catch the two other rafts, splash them with our paddles m, and then pass them to “win” the “race” down the river. I didn’t initially understand this, but when we came within splashing distance, right after our first patch of white water nearly threw me over the edge and then right into the raft in front of us, I was quickly brought up to speed as a face full of water was artfully aimed and "paddle tossed" at me. 

It was all in good fun of course.  Sometimes, they got caught on a rock, and we laughed and splashed them and then as life goes, sometimes it was our turn to rock back and forth to free ourselves from where we were stuck as they laughed, splashed and passed us down the river. 

About mid way down the trip, we were told to all get out of the boats and whether we liked it or not, we were swimming and having our pictures taken under a waterfall. 

One of the guys in the group had that cool plastic case that allows you to bring your phone into the water and I offered to take a picture of them as a a group – which I did, but only after slipping and landing on my rear end much to delight of the entire group, my feet up in the air, phone still clutched my kltuzy hand. 

We stopped a little while later for what I thought was lunch, and I accepted the offer of a beer from a woman that had a bunch of different choices in a basket. She opened it for me and then held out her hand. The guide yelled down, “Do you have money?” I had thought it was part of our tour, and I shook my head, I had given all the money I had brought to the agency. He said something to her in Indonesian, and she took back the beer shaking her head, before proceeding to hammer the cap back on with her opener. I shrugged and apologized again, feeling a flush in my face, until my female boat mates insisted on a dorky picture all together and the incident was forgotten. 

In the second half of the trip, we caught up to a group from Bali Adventure tours,  and I saw what I had expected my trip to be like. Three boats, filled with passengers that were all white or Japanese, tattoos and sunburn, go pros attached to their heads.”Mayor!” screamed Wayan, our guide. “Gooooo!” 

And we passed their group as well, but not without a good splashing. 

And then after a few more “mayors” and “madurs” and a backwards descent down a set of rivers, past a few waterfalls and some sort of strange piping into the river that we had to duck under, we had arrived. 

Back to shore. 

Back to the walk up the hundreds of steps where I would no longer be part of Hotel Purem something or other.

Did we win - you were wondering? 

Do you even need to ask that question?