I always want to try river rafting, especially the one at Cagayan De Oro, the premier river rafting location in the Philippines (which Lot had already tried before). But since Davao has a 13 kilometer River that also boasts some decent rapids, I was glad to be able to experience it there.
The river rafting wasn’t really part of our itinerary, on our last day in Davao (Monday) we thought we could just do simple touring and try to stay away from tiring activities we did the previous days. But as we arrived at the Crocodile Park we saw a group of people huddled together being lectured by one of the rafting guides, for us it was an opportunity to add on to our Davao experience.
We paid the fee, 2k for each person, sounds expensive but after you go through the whole ordeal im pretty sure it’ll be very much worth it. I mean i told myself, these are the reasons why i save money, why i work so i can able to afford these kind of undertakings, it was sort of a reward for living life not grandiosely but in a simple yet exciting way.
It was really safe, you get to wear a life jacket, learn the proper position so you can easily float along the water current, we get to experience doing that by just letting the river current carry our body and of course riding the raft as it approach numerous rapids, which seems pretty good since it rained in Davao the previous week.
Anyway the whole river rafting took us more or less 4-5 hours with lunch break in between and photo ops courtesy of one of the guides who was in a single raft, rafting over us and waiting for us to pass some trickery rapids for him to start shooting pictures. Our guide Patrick was game enough to crack jokes in between.
My arms were weary afterwards, since i was the only male in the raft i had to – you know show them how strong my arms were hehe, but body pains, river water inside my lungs, learning and then panicking a bit while floating along the current, fear of deep water and all, it was a worthwhile experience.
And this, is one of the reason why I’ll definitely come back to Davao next year, hopefully with more friends in tow to share the experience with.
