First time rafting
Lebaksaman, Cibiuk, Garut. Our cars can’t move any further. The road is impossible for car to pass through. The decision is absolute, walking until Cimanuk River. Some minutes later, here we are..12 people (me and my friends) and 6 raft crewmen, brief up ourself with rafting equipment on the Cimanuk River shore. 12 people divided into 2 boat, 6 person each. A skipper (captain) from crewmen commanding each boat. 4 crew take the 3rd boat, as rescue team.
Half past 11 AM, after some safety instruction, the journey begin..
my boat is the last boat to set sail, after the rescue team and the first passenger boat. umm..it’s not quite correct to use ‘passenger’ word, because we are not stand still or sleeping there, we’re rowing oph course 
Some of the first rapids already give us sensation. we move through them with shouting and screaming, just like riding something in Dufan Park hehe.., so we see rapids as a fun maker, not a danger obstacle, oph course we still do what the skipper command to us, like row forward, row backward, all to right, all to back, etc. but we always do that with fun. so me and the rest from my boat think that rapids rafting basically is a fun adventure, but waitta minute!!!
when we passed the first boat, i don’t see them cheering in fun or happy, the tense is so high with them, maybe they see this journey as a challengeful danger to overcome? dunno..
but i think it’s better if they see as we see, this journey should be fun at the first place!
Rapids continued…and that’s when the first ‘victim’ got bumped by the rapids and fell to the river, not from my boat hehe.. easy job for the rescue team though..
not a little longer, my boatmate got bumped by some big rapids and fell to the water, my God, the rescue team still a little way behind after rescuing the other! fortunately, my boatmate got her hand twisted by boat side rope, so she is still with us somehow. me and the other boatmate succesfully rescued her hehe..
For a while, there’s no significant rapids, so we can enjoy the riverside view, lho? what’s that? at the farside, there’s a huge lizardlike stand still at the shore, my God? an aligator? wait..wait, whaddya doin’ skipper? why d’ u bring the boat closer to it? and..lho? the rescue boat already there? one of them hop down and approach the creature from its blind side..what? he want to take a photo of it? insane??!! Suddenly, i think because our boat approaching directly to it, the creature found it as a menace, and run with high speed…towards the rescue boat!! some of the rescue team got panicked and hit it with the row. Bad move!! don’t u know aligator will be enraged when the menace got bigger? you’ll be eaten!!! but..heh? the creature escaped and swim to the river?? is it not aligator? waitta minute, when i see it, the skin is soft-like, not crocodile type skin, and it escape the menace without any warning attack.., bwahahaha..then it is a biawak then, just a salvator lizard, but still it so huge that my first sight recognize it as an aligator, only an excuse though… arrghh…shame on me 
Ok, the journey continued…and when we passed the other boat, we got info that the previous ‘victim’ fell to the river for another 2 times, even when he change place 2 times..bwahaha..!!
We stopped at a shore to take our break and have a lunch. the lunch provided by our car that already take a route and waiting for us at that car-passable shore. our boat team has our energy drains out, not by the struggling to overcome the rapids, but becoz of too much laughing and screaming hehe..
after lunch, i thought that we’ll have a longer breaktime, but the skipper said that if we do that, we’ll finish the route over the maghrib time, hell..no!!
then we continue our journey, not with an energized body, but with more exhausted body becoz the food digestion is already startin..
to make it worse, our skipper said that the most dangerous rapids awaits for us there, and he don’t want to says the exact location…walah..!! he only said that the rapid is considered dangerous because there is an ‘hidraulic’ current of water that work like a waterpump, sucking thing downward and push it upward in a wheel motion..bah, i can’t explain it clearly with this brain of mine, whatever.
for real! the rapids in this 2nd half route are all biggers than the previous half, our boat is always flooded by water after passing each rapids. sometimes our boat got stuck by some big rock, still our good and fun teamwork can make it through hehe..
That’s when another big rock overcome our fun time, there’s when we try our hard and whatever energy left on us to escape from that rock. After some die hard struggle, we succesfully made it, and we celebrate it spontaneously with…another laughing and shouting, unaware that the rock we passed is the gate to the dangerous rapids!!!!
Then it happen, suddenly, unavoidable, unprepared, our boat suffer a big shock, and one of my boatmate fell to the ‘hidraulic’ current. i can’t do much, my hand can’t reach him, and i can’t make the boat get closer to him because the fast river flow push our boat further to the front. i can only see his feet upward on the river surface..
the rescue team fail to reach him, since unlucky my boatmate got thrown to the furthest side of rescue team, but the furthest team is near the riverside, from far away, i can see him swim to get himself to the riverside, but unluckily, there is another ‘hidraulic’ current just before the riverside. He found himself start to get swallowed by the 2nd current. Fortunately, there is a village native close to him and grab him with a rod. Saved…..Alhamdulillah..
After my boatmate comeback to the boat and ready to continue, we continue the journey…with our last breath because of tired hehe..
after that, we face some significant rapids but we can overcame it, but..the unpredictable thing happens…our skipper fell to the river!! waduh, the rowing key is the skipper, without him, the boat became uncontrolled!! because my position is the nearest to the skippers’, i try to replace his position. back there i’m already saw the skipper technique of rowing, and it’s different from ‘passenger’ rowing technique. so i think i can do it, but..knowing it and doing it is two different things, it so hard to row the skipper technique, and my body is already exhausted..luckily, our skipper can rescue himself and i can see him swimming closer to our boat..fiuhh…replacement skipper is back to his position hehe..
At last, we finished our journey. we arrived at around 5 PM on a shore in Cibatu, Garut. Then, we take our Ashar prayer and return to Bandung, hoping that the aftereffect fatigue won’t force us to cancel our tomorrow activities. whatever it is, rafting rawks!!
