Rafting is for pussies!

OK, I'll be fair, the real serious stuff is full on, and San Gil has possibly Colombia's most fearsome ride on the Rio Suarez, a couple of hours crashing down grade 5+ rapids.  Unfortunately this was out of our budget, but for less than a third of the cost the Fonce offered us some grade 2-3 action.  But as I said, rafting is for pussies; we chose to do the same stretch on boogie boards...welcome to Hydrospeed!



Photo courtesty of Google Images.  We were too
cheapskate to pay for the real ones!

We'd been looking for something really fun to do for a while, after a couple of weeks feeling under the weather and a lot of travelling.  San Gil is a tiny town a few hours north of Bogota but is a popular weekend getaway for residents of the capital.  It also has a reputation as somewhat of an adrenalin centre and offers caving, paragliding, mountain biking, abseiling down waterfalls etc., along with a few sedate and pleasant places to hike and swim.  And of course the aforementioned river runs.  We'd been warned beforehand that most people come out of their Hydrospeed experience with a bump or two, but it just seemed like cruising down average sized rapids in a large raft just wouldn't do it for us.  Holding on to a foam board and kicking your way down with fins certainly gets you much closer to the action and seemingly amplifies the size of the rapids.  It was such fun, we mostly giggled our way down the 10km run and by the end had managed to surf a couple of eddies too.  Highly recommended.  If you don't mind picking up a bruise or two that is...