12th March Bucaramanga – San Gil 65 miles

We are heading for Villa deLeiva but going via San Gill as it is a good town for adventure activities and we may try to do some white water rafting.
The road is fantastic winding us up and down, we go from 1000 masl to 600, then back up 1800 and down again. We start running along a ledge in a valley with massive mountains towering over us, the landscape is just stunning.
After a while the road surface disappears and we get held up for ages which could be another landslide but it turns out to be due to resurfacing work being carried out, this may well be due to the heavy rains they had last November when roads were washed away. We have seen a lot of evidence of this and it must be a mammoth task to rebuild and keep the major routes open at the same time.
When we arrive in San Gil amazingly we find the adventure center quite quickly, this is helped by good road names and signage for a change.
Well its seems we are staying here for the night as we have been able to book onto a white water rafting session this afternoon, so we go off to find a hotel.
Agiain reasonably straightforward once I had sorted my calle from my carrera’s. Secure parking here is once again drive in through the front door and leave it in the foyer.
Once back at the adventure centre we meet our partners for the day, 5 young guys, 3 from Columbia and 2 from Panama, they all speak good English, so another result. Off we go in the minibus and we pick up the boat and our captain and then go quite a way upstream, we unload the boat from its trailer and done our lifejackets and helmets and then carry the boat down to the river. A comprehensive briefing then takes place in Spanish and Martin and I thought that it would be repeated in English but sadly our capitain doesn’t do English. One of our fellow travellers then gives us the bones of what was said and we get afloat and start gently drifting downstream. As soon as we leave our captain uses his paddle to splash most of us, so we are not concerned about getting wet now. We soon hit a fast moving stretch and take quite a bit of water on board but there are holes in the bottom so it drains down very quickly.
At the next lull, at least I thought it was a lull, we are told to jump out of the boat I guess so that we can practice retrieving someone into the boat. Well it seems to be quiet and slow moving but once in the water you see just how quickly the water is moving and how powerful the current is. Everyone recovered we continue down over some more rapids and then the next test is a balnce test, we stow our paddles and all stand on the outer tubes of the boat holding each other and it all seems quite stable and then suddenly 4 of us are in the river again, I am sure we were pushed. It is quite lumpy here so it takes a while to get us all back in the boat but all back safely in we progress.
Having moved on quite a bit we are moving quite quickly and suddenly the boat lurches violently and we lose another 4 overboard, we ask how the lurch occurred and our capitain had put a karabiner on the side of the boat and pulled up which tipped the boat on its side, great fun.
Another boat has now overtaken us with all our faffing so we give chase and soak them as we pass and manage to lose a couple more of our crewmates overboard in the process. A bit further on we thought our capitain had flipped the boat again but apparently we had hit a rock and the boat stopped and tipped forward before slipping sideways back into the flow of the river.
Back to the shop and we take a look at the photos, what great fun and what a great crew we had with us.