There are plenty of activities to keep visitors busy in Jinja, Uganda — some of them include quad biking, horse backing, and kayaking — but the most popular choice is white water rafting on the Nile River.

Activities can be booked right at the campsite and transportation is included (so are meals if it’s a half or full day). Novice rafters are welcome. A full-day trip costs $125 and comes with perks like a free night or two of accommodation; check their website when you book to make the most of it.

Here’s what makes white water rafting on this stretch of the Nile an unforgettable experience: it’s mostly grade 5 rapids. Lots of them, in a row, with a few grade 4’s and one grade 6 (!) thrown in for good measure. (As non-professionals, we’re not actually allowed to go on a grade 6 rapid and will walk around that one.) It’s the biggest adrenaline-rush bang for your buck.

(image via)

A quick geography lesson on the Nile River (I needed a brush-up myself) — at 4,250 miles, it’s the longest river in the world. It snakes through eleven countries, but the actual source of the river is right here in Jinja, Uganda, as it begins in Lake Victoria and then heads up north through South Sudan, Sudan, and Egypt.

So who could resist the opportunity to go rafting at the very source of this powerful river, which has been a lifeline of civilization for millennia? Sign me up!

We depart early for the rafting headquarters. Breakfast chapati is served (they call it a rolex) along with containers of fresh fruit for every guest.

After picking up our life vests and helmets (the dudes behind the counter kindly help me mount my GoPro with some plastic zip ties), we hop into the truck for a 30-minute ride to the put-in area. There’s a brief traffic jam on the back roads as we navigate around this truck carrying cane (I think):

We leave most of our stuff — flip-flops, dry clothes, and towels — in the car for later. Staff warns me that my sunglasses might fall off but I’m wearing a back-up pair and decide to take the risk (I’ll tuck them into my bathing suit during rapids so as not to lose them). I’ve also got the aforementioned GoPro on my helmet and an underwater camera strapped to my wrist. There’s a dry bag on every raft and I’ll ask our guide to hold onto my sunscreen since I’ll need to reapply several times during the day.

Here’s how they transport the rafts down to the river:

The guy above has a sense of humor — I ask if I can take his photo and he replies, “No, I’m wanted by the police!” before kindly posing.

After a brief safety lesson, it’s time to get into our rafts.

Point of interest: during the initial pitch where they sell these rafting trips, the employees emphasize that you can choose how adventurous your trip will be — if you’re new and nervous, the guide will ensure you don’t tip over. If you’re a seasoned rafter looking for bonus thrills, your guide will approach each rapid at the strongest part of the current to make you tip over. Even though we all go down the same stretch of river, each rafting experience is different based on how the guide navigates — one meter to the left or right can make a big difference in the adrenaline rush.

With those expectations in place, I figure that once we’re about to get in the boats the guides will tell everyone looking for an easy-going raft experience to go to one end of the shore, and everyone looking for a crazy trip with lots of flips to go to the other end… and everyone else in the middle. Except they don’t. We’re told to get into groups of eight and then jump into a raft… with no consideration for the type of rafting experience we want.

This is frustrating because I am nervous about flipping over in the raft (I had a scary rafting experience a few years ago where I go knocked around underwater like a sock in the spin cycle). I know it’ll happen, but I certainly don’t want to get tossed overboard all day long… and I don’t want to hold back my friends who are looking for a more intense rafting experience. So this puts me in a bit of a pickle. I hop into a raft with two of my overland mates and a Dutch family of four.

This is our guide Josh. He’s fabulous. And ripped! Cheryl and I exchange glances as he strips off layers throughout the day.

During our safety briefing, Cheryl demonstrates the proper position for a rescue… getting up close and personal with these kayak rescue guys.

We practice tipping over and how to properly get back into the raft (as seen on the video at the end of this post)… and then we’re off!

We get a little stuck at the top of our first rapid (above) but then fly down the rest of it.

The boat after us is not so lucky — they get majorly stuck on a rock and most of the people in the raft fall out. That’s my nightmare, floating through a major rapid with lots of rocks. At least we’re wearing helmets?

It turns out we’re the last boat to (successfully) go down this rapid and everyone else gets out to walk around it. When the water level is higher this isn’t a problem.

There are long stretches between rapids that are calm and serene.

And then there are little rapids like these that don’t count as a class 5 experience but are nonetheless fun to cascade down. Actually, I love these baby rapids — the taste of a thrill without the actual danger of getting tossed out and hitting your head on a rock.

This rapid looks deceptively small but it makes a big splash:

Whenever we get thirsty, the kayak dudes (who are primarily there to rescue any stranded rafters) distribute bottles of water.

We get fresh pineapple as a snack — the guides flip over a single kayak, whip out a big knife, and chop up pineapple slices on the underside of the kayak.

My food model Cheryl (I should really start paying her) shows off our snack. The pineapple slices are cut so that chunks easily fall off. It’s juicy and delicious.

Okay, break time is over… back to the rapids!

I’m consistently surprised by the aesthetics of the Nile River. I think it’s because I’ve traditionally associated it with Egypt, so I’ve always pictured the Nile to be more desert-like — think dusty shores sparsely populated by cacti. But along this green stretch in Uganda, the Nile might pass as the Connecticut River!

We’ve arrived at the class 6 rapid. It’s only safe for experienced rafters, so we get out of the river and walk around it. We pass by locals who have just washed their laundry in the water and spread it out to dry.

Okay, we’re back in and ready to tackle the next expanse of river.

Around this time the Dutch family gets out of the raft, as they’ve only signed up for a half-day trip (transportation waits for them at a designated pick-up spot). Later on we tell other rafts that the crocs got them but we survived.

Our guide Josh does a backflip off our raft:

We round a bend and begin to hear high-pitched squeals in the distance.

There are thousands of bats circling this island… in broad daylight! I didn’t realize that was possible.

But we don’t have time to think about it because our next rapid is fast approaching.

We pick up a girl who got separated from her raft; we give her a lift back to her group.

Two more rapids left… so far we haven’t flipped but Josh says we have to at least once. My stomach is in knots just thinking about it. My raft mates are marvelously patient as I scream during every rapid, then compose myself and say, “Hey guys, that wasn’t too bad, right?”

I am such a wuss.

The final calm before the storm…

One rapid left and it’s a big one. This overturned raft doesn’t look too promising.

We hit a big swell and Natalie flies out of our raft, hitting the water in a superman pose. Oh shit. I start screaming her name, as well as other expletives which you can hear in the video at the end of this post.

Cheryl and I hold on tight, but our raft tips over on the next swell.

During our morning safety briefing they told us that when we flip over, we should just hold our breath and remain calm as we’ll never be underwater for more than 10 seconds before our life vests carry us up to the surface. So when we flip and I’m tossed underwater, I estimated the time to be around seven seconds.

I watch the video later and it’s barely two seconds. But it feels like an eternity!

Josh swims over to check in while we’re waiting for the raft — I’m bobbing up and down in the water, struggling to catch my breath. In re-watching this GoPro footage, I realized I was SUCH a baby! After half a minute he starts to swim away and I yell, “Don’t leave me!” HA!

Eventually one of the kayak guys comes around and I hang on (with my legs, as they’ve told us to do…) to wait while they flip our raft so we can climb back in.

Once we’re back on board, there’s only a few minutes left until we reach the end of our trip.

A gratuitous shot of our shirtless guide:

The buffet lunch is excellent — roast beef! Fresh veggies! Hummus and guac!

What a way to explore the Nile. I’m glad I did this, even though I screamed like a girl and was terrified of flipping over.

I leave you with this video footage from the trip — it’s nearly six minutes, which is longer than I intended, but it’s fast-paced and there’s a lot of sweet footage from the rapids.

So would you do this? Seriously, I am curious. Before this trip I’d never considered rafting to be all that extreme, but now I think about it in a different way.

Thanks to Nile River Explorers for hosting my trip. Opinions are my own.