7am arrival at the rafting place. Luckily, the company I booked with, which i subsequently discovered had an awful reputation, didnt have enough people to run a trip, so they put me into another companies. Relieved, i boarded the bus with the other 23 would-be rafters and sat down. Sergio the guide introduced himself, and then opended with the line "I understand that not everyone is from Israel today, who is from somewhere else?". I raised my hand. Looking forward, i was alone. With an impending sense of fear i turned to see two other hands on the back row. When they said they were from Ireland i actually wiped my brow and sighed. Another great way to endear yourself to 21 Israelis with whom you are going to spend the next 3 days together.
Supposedly, as I later discovered, all Israelis have to do militarily service from the age of 18, 3 years for boys, and 2 years for girls. Then, at 21/22 yrs old, they go travelling. Except they ALL go either to South America, or to South East Asia. And they ALL use the same website and stay in the same hostels and book the same trips. The company we were with had peruvian guides, who now spoke Hebrew, and catered with Kosher food! Incredible.
Luckily the Israelis were all quite keen to chat and talk, partly as they spend all their time meeting other Israelis who have done and are doing exactly the same thing as them. Thinking as they had done milatarily service they all would be hard as nails, we boarded our boats on the first day for practice, to find out that milatarily service didnt necessarily endear one with super human strenght, or an ability to follow simple instructions, such as stop, followed by stop paddling now! Almost flipping the boat on the first day on a class 3 rapid, it didnt bode well for class 4 and 5 the following day. However, with 5 israelis in my boat, one peruvian guide who also spoke hebrew, we still had to speak the queens english for my benefit. Guilty i hear you say? Hell no, i knew they could easily slag me off and i would be none the wiser, so i was content with this swap.
Three days of rafting along 50km of the canon, with amazing food, and sleeping out on the beaches along the Apurimac river was so much fun. My introductly lessons with Hebrew (Katanchi meaning short arse), eating shushlaka for breakfast, and enjoying the amazing scenery was well worth the sun burn, bites and chapped lips i´ve returned with.
The Irish couple i met were however a god send, and John and Naimh were such a laugh when all we could hear around us was Hebrew, as we discussed all the topics we could discuss over the campfire that night. We did get to the Arab Israeli conflict, although we didnt have the balls to pull out a copy of the Koran and ask if any of them had read this amazing new book we had just discovered............
