Geek Out, Saturday

On Saturday, the Geek Out experience continued, with an early breakfast – traditional Sri Lankan, and very good. Shortly after this, Danese showed up, and then a little later Ken arrived, with the T-shirts that had been left in Colombo.

We all piled in the bus, and headed for the raft landing, where helmets, life jackets, and paddles were handed out. Some guys from the hotel carried the rafts down a precariously steep set of stairs, and we trooped after. At the bottom, we piled into the rafts and took a test drive across the river to a beach on the other side.

Some of the crews were better than others. I won’t say which was which. 😉

After a brief instruction on how to row, we started down the river, going through rapids with delightful names like “head chopper” and “killer falls”. I haven’t had that much fun in a VERY long time. There are a variety of different photos floating about, and I’ll upload more once I get home. The bandwidth here is not really condusive to uploading multiple megabytes of photos.

High points include jumping off of a rock directly into the rapids, and then floating downstream from there, and seeing the spot where they blew up the bridge for the movie “Bridge over the river Kwai”. Now I need to see that again, as it has been a long time since I saw it last.

When we returned to Rafter’s Retreat, wet and bedraggled, we walked up the road to the lodge, incurring the wrath of more leeches. I’ve grown to really hate leeches. Lunch was ready soon, and then I was very ready for a nap.

But Danese and Dave wanted to play Werewolf, so we gathered in a circle to play Werewolf. Folks seemed to really enjoy the game, and take a deep pleasure in indulging the mob instinct for a while. I wasn’t a werewolf.

More than half of the folks left on Saturday evening, leaving the rest of us to brave it out for one more evening. Most of us were exhausted and turned in early. We didn’t have any particular plans for the next day other than heading back to Colombo, but we wanted the relaxation of hanving out in the jungle for another night.