January 10, 2011

Sunday started with breakfast at 5:30 am and boarding the buses at 6:00 am. The University of Missouri students joined us for the day. We headed to Brotas which is about two hours from Paricacaba for a fun day. Brotas is a town known for its trekking and rafting. Lots of young people live in the area. Most of our students slept on the way but were quickly awakened when they found out they would be zip lining and hiking in the morning and rafting in the afternoon.




We were introduced to the safety of zip lining, the do’s and don'ts and given our equipment.


Then one by one we road 6 zip lines across a gorgeous waterfall and hiking area. I think I recall we were 60 meters above the waterfall. After the six zip lines we were able to do the second zip line again which was directly over the falls. This time we could enjoy it rather than being scared half to death. This series of pictures starts with the leader describing the experience and the safety, then the securing of equipment, getting up to the starting post and a picture taken while traveling three of the zip lines. Only two of our people got stuck in the middle of a zip line and we all lived to tell the story!!!





Once everyone completed the zip lines we hiked down to the waterfall where the students could walk on the rocks, get in the water, play and look up as people zip lined above the waterfall. Hopefully these pictures can give you the image of the total experience. It was quite breath taking.


We boarded the buses and stopped for lunch at a quaint family owned restaurant where the food was great. The students got to try some new fruit right from the trees: guava, mango and a fruit they couldn’t even tell us a translation. It tasted like the combination of chewing gum and banana.

From there we went back into Brotas proper where we prepared for the rafting. Again we had a safety demonstration, learned the commands in Portuguese that we would hear from the guides assigned to each raft, divided off into groups of seven and then practiced in a small lake. Because of all the rain the river was high and some of the rapids were judged to be level 4. The guides were fantastic! We didn’t always know our commands: Forward, backward, get down but we all had smiles on our faces at the end. The guides love their jobs. They had a blast!! We have a CD with pictures taken by the rafting company and I think each of our students had a memorable time. A couple of the rafts did tip over but it was the Missouri students not the OSU students. GO BUCKS!!! The guides then sang to us, in Portuguese of course, on the bus ride back to the livery.

All in all, it was a very physical day, lots of adrenaline, lots of stories and lots of memories.