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Published: October 9th 2007
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The adventure begins in the beautiful scenery of the Yoshino River. I am always getting emails about events happening on mainland Shikoku that other foreign English teachers plan. Unfortunately, I rarely attend any of the gatherings because living out here in the middle of the Inland Sea makes it really difficult to get there and back. However, I got an email about a white water rafting trip that was happening on the Yoshino River in a quasi-national park in mid-eastern Shikoku, and I couldn’t pass it up. It’s also interesting to hang out with other foreign English teachers because it’s always such a diverse group of people (rather than me and a bunch of Japanese people, like usual). In fact, I was the only person from the U.S. on this trip. There were people from England, Wales, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Canada.
The town where our rafting trip started was a beautiful small town in the middle of the mountains with the clear waters of the Yoshino River running through it. The Yoshino River has Japan’s most intense white water, and is supposed to be one of the top rivers for rafting in the world. I saw a lot of buses driving people holding paddles and wearing helmets and life jackets
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the superhero pose in our wetsuits around. It reminded me of all the white water buses in West Virginia. One of the English teacher’s coworker, the P.E. teacher also works as a rafting guide on this river on the weekends, so we met her at the “Lucky Raft” business and got geared up for the trip.
I had been rafting back in the U.S. before, and I don’t remember the rules being quite as strict. It wasn’t a cool day, but they made us all wear wetsuits in addition to our helmets and life jackets. I protested a little because I thought I definitely didn’t need a wetsuit, but I soon gave in. It was kind of fun to wear anyway as I had never worn a wetsuit before. It made me feel like a superhero, so I made everyone pose for a superhero photo. Finally, before we rode in the van down to the river, we did some exercises to get our muscles ready for the river madness.
We sat on the river bank to listen to safety rules before piling in to the raft and plowing through our first set of rapids which came almost immediately as we started off. There were
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stretching the muscles in preparation for the beating of the Yoshino River plenty of rapids, so we didn’t have to worry about paddling too much. We just let the river carry us where it wanted us to go. During the calm periods in between rapids we all jumped out of the raft and floated down the river on our backs looking up at the blue sky and the big fluffy white clouds. It was so refreshing. The water seemed really clean (as opposed to a lot of other polluted streams I’ve seen in Japan). The river winds its way through the beautiful Koboke canyon which has been carved out by the river over years and years. Many unusually shaped rock formations can be seen along the steep sides of the schist canyon.
Once we stopped at some rocks jutting out of the water and our guide told us all to get out to do some cliff jumping (Ah!). I have some bad memories of the last time I jumped off of a cliff, but luckily these rocks weren’t as high as what I jumped off before. They were just high enough to be fun and thrilling. It was so fun that I jumped off more than once. Our guide also entertained
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the gear us during the smooth parts of the river by making us do tricks on the raft. Once he told us to all stand around the rim of the raft and hold hands. Then, if we all had a “good friendship” we could lean back and not fall out of the boat. So much for that. We all fell out before we even had a chance to lean back.
Another trick we tried was pulling the front of our raft up like a sail and trying to balance it for as long as possible. I decided to try it out. I stood on the back rim of the raft and pulled the rope tied to the front of the raft while leaning back towards the water. Everyone shifted their weight to the back of the raft, but I was losing my balance and I couldn’t hold on to the rope any longer. So, the raft flipped over, on top of all of us. Oops! We took turns trying, and no one could balance it for more than a couple seconds. Finally, after many tries, one of the women, Emily, was victorious and we sailed down the river balancing our raft
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I'm taking charge at the front of the raft! for a while.
We went through a few more rapids after that. Miraculously, nobody fell out of the raft. Our guide had us do a cheer every time we made it through a set of rapids. We all put our paddles to the center and jumped up and down in the raft. Finally, right before the end of trip down the Yoshino River, We jumped off some more rocks, this time into some mild rapids that carried us down to the ending point of our trip.
All-in-all it was a really fun trip, and I somehow just barely caught the last ferry that goes back to Yuge at 6:30pm after stuffing my face with Indian food! The others had a bet going that I wouldn’t make my last ferry. Ha! I showed them! Now, I really want to go back to the Yoshino River area and do some hiking, since this trip was too short for that. I heard a lot about these ancient bridges made out of vines they have there on the hiking trails that I’d like to see. So, maybe I will plan a hiking trip in the future. We’ll see.
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