Rafting in Sjoa
This weekend we have been at my parents house in Lillehammer. On Saturday we set off from the house around 8 in the morning with my two brothers and drove up Gudbrandsdalen to a place called Sjoa. It was about 1 & 1/2 to drive. Apparently the rivers up there are among the best in the world for rafting.
We arrived at the camp, and were assigned wet suits, diving shoes, life jacket and helmets. They had a big old american wan with two rafts on the roof, and they drove us about 15 minutes upstream. After pulling the rafts off the car, we had about 10 minutes of instructions about how to sit on the raft, and what to do when the guide were yelling commands, and then we got out into the foaming river.
It was great fun, and it didn't really feel dangerous, but it was quite wet. When we hit the rapids, we got sprayed with clean mountain water, and pretty quickly the boat was filled with water up to our ankles. Nobody fell out while we were going downstream, so when we reached the bottom we were "surfing" some pretty harmless rapids. Surfing basically means trying to get the rubber fleet front pressed down into the rapids, so that the back were sticking out of the water. A couple of guys fell out then, and swimmed to shore, and in the end we flipped the raft on purpose, so that everybody went out.
It didn't make much differencec by then, as our wet suits were pretty soaked already. They told us the mountain river water held about 12 degrees celcius, but it didn't really feel so cold with the suits. After the surfing, we went downstream about 1 more kilometer, then pulled the rafts out of the water, and lifted them on top of the car. Then we went back to the camp for lunch.
All in all, it was a great experience, and I think we will try it again, but maybe next time we will go for a more extreme program. The camp had their own photographer, and we got the digital pics on cd for a pretty steep price :) I've put them online on picasaweb. In case you're interested, the operator we rated with is sjoaadventure.com, but there are about 6 different companies operating in Sjoa.
