The Bocklock Chronicles: Day 2

This day was easily one of the best days of my trip!

Roosters began cawing at somewhere between 5am and 6am so everyone was up early. After a light breakfast of eggs, toast, and coffee, we wasted not time returning to the jungle where we would be trekking for 3 1/2 hours. After many stops to keep Leona from passing out, we finally arrived at a small camp by the river. Our guides chopped down some bamboo and began to carve out some bowls and chop sticks for our meal while a local prepared some noodle soup. After eating we walked down to the river where our bamboo rafts await.

Now I have done plenty of white water rafting and nothing has compared to this. First off, there is absolutely no protection of any kind, just us and the raft. That means, no helmets, no life vest's, so seat, no straps, and even oars. Instead of oars, we get these huge bamboo rods that are used by planting them into either the bottom of the river or anything we can reach, and pushing off. As with most water boats, the steering is done from the rear of the boat, with bamboo rafting it is steered from the front. I was lucky enough to get to steer our raft four about 30minutes in which only two errors were made. The first, I didn't see this giant rock below the raft and beached us. The second was trying to slow us down by jamming the rod into the ground just in front of the raft. Upon doing this the rod got stuck and mud and was plowed over by the raft. I then had to get down in my stomach, almost completely submerging myself in water, and retrieve it. Now I thought that other than those two minor mistakes, I was pretty good at this. But our guide Nu showed everyone up by steering his raft while fishing. By the end of the 2 1/2 trip, he had not beached once and caught almost 25 fish that would be eaten that evening.

We docked the rafts on the banks of the Lisu Village where we would be spending the next night. We all settled in and rested for about 30 minutes before getting fitted for mountain bikes. Surprisingly, the bikes were hard tails and not so bad. We rode around for about an hour stopping to observe the farmers and talking to Nu and Lasso's friends along the way. One of the guys we spoke to gave us a bottle of moonshine rice whiskey that he prepares himself. We rode the rest of the way home watching the sun set over the mountains and eagerly returned to the village for cleanup and dinner.

We closed out the night drinking moonshine and beer around a bon fire while playing ice breakers and bocklock.