Paragliding and Rafting

Wow!
Long time no blog…So sorry to let my followers down, I have just been crazy busy living the Argentina dream!

Well I will start with last weekend: rafting and paragliding…WOW!! Soooooo much fun!! PARAGLIDING: this was definitely one of the coolest things I have ever experienced…First of all, it prolly wasn’t super safe but we will look past that because I am alive and it was so much fun! Pancho (this super creepy guy that seemed to have some sort of a crush on me, requesting me to call him “hot dog” because that is what pancho means in Spanish…don’t worry I called him Pancho!) picks us up at the plaza and loads 12 of us in a 6 person car…boy did we look silly! So we ride on outside of town and get to the parapente (paragliding) site. Then we pile into the back of a truck and drive up the mountain, which turned out to be the scariest part of the whole experience. It was not safe because there really wasn’t a road on this mountain but whatever….so it takes us AN HOUR to get up there but we finally make it and then we get our partners (the professionals that fly off the mountain with us, its kinda like skydiving)…of COURSE, creepy Pancho aka “hot dog” insists on being my partner, but I don’t let this get to me, I still enjoyed the flight. So we get all harnessed up, and then just start sprinting off the side of the mountain (the whole time I am just praying that our parachute is functioning)…thank the Lord it worked and for the next 30 minutes, we were floating around the Andes…it was absolutely majestic and I am so happy I did it!

RAFTING: 2 days later, we went rafting in the Mendoza river…boy was this an adventure!!! They put us all in wet suits (because we will be rafting in glacier water), and put us on a bus to take us to our starting spot. So we get a very brief lesson about rafting through the Andes, I was so nervous about falling out of the raft, I didn’t though thank goodness! Our guide (‘crusty’) was his name, WEIRD….his English was very broken, and he would said the “F” word before just about every word…haha, it was kinda funny cuz he had a very thick accent! There are 6 of us total in our raft (including Crusty), Austin and Kyle in the front, Emily and Elizabeth in the middle, and Crusty and I in the back. We start off small (class I and II rapids), then as we progress down the river they get bigger… The total route was like 12 km (mas o menos), so after 6 km or so, the rapids start getting bigger and we start getting splashed with glacier water…oh baby it was piercingly cold! We were at the class III and IV rapids so it was super fun and we didn’t care! it was fine until the last 10 minutes (the ride was about an hour long), the last 10 minutes we were just numb and couldn’t move, but it was SOOOO worth it! It was a beautiful experience and one of the guys from the rafting company took pix (they are on facebook and are really pretty)! We ate lunch at the little lodge out there and then went home!