Raft Guide School Week 1

I am presently in Greymouth, New Zealand learning to guide whitewater rafts. Greymouth is in the Grey District, and the city sits where the Grey River meets the ocean on the west coast. It has steep mountains behind it which stops clouds and causes it to rain all the time here. And the skies are always grey - if you can believe that!

The school itself is incredible. I have many years of guiding experience, but I have a lot of bad muscle memory to overcome:) There are 9 people in the class and three instructors. We take three boats everywhere, which means we all get a lot of "time on the paddle." We start at 7am everyday and don't finish until 8pm. I'm very sore but I'm sure I'll be returning super fit.

The other students in the class are great and come from all over. One American (me), one Canadian, one Estonian, one Australian, and five Kiwis. Everyone here wants to be here and is motivated which adds to the program quite a bit.

On the weekends we stay in the school dorms so that's pretty fun. All our roommates are between 16-19 and when we got back last night from a hard first week, we found out one of them was having a birthday party. We thought we wouldn't be able to sleep, but we had people passing out by 8pm. It didn't go for much longer and we had no problem sleeping:) Unfortunately, there is no Internet at the dorms, and the only place to use it is the coin-operated kiosk at the grocery store. I am unable to bring up gmail, so that will have to wait.

During the week we camp out near the rivers we run. Every day we do a different section or a new river. The rivers are all incredible, and it's weird to me that there are no other boaters or commercial crews running on them. We're all by ourselves for the most part and the seclusion is pretty nice. I asked one of the tutors (they're not instructors:) out this and he said that most Kiwis don't have their own kayaks or boats, so the rivers aren't very busy.

I'm out of coins, so I'm off to the pharmacy to buy anti-itch cream (got bit by a lot of sand flies) and then back to the dorms for a nap. I'm exhausted!