We had ten minutes to chug as much coffee from the breakfast buffet as we could before the Shearwater bus picked us up at 6:40am and we joined the ranks of the other crazies rafting the Zambezi. The coffee hadn’t kicked in yet, but the Indemnity Form sure woke us up:

The Zambezi River in the gorges below is classified as a Grade Five river, defined by the book of the British Canoe Union as follows:

“Extremely difficult, long and violent rapids, steep gradients, big drops, pressure areas.”

We all got a little quiet, and when the guide started handing out flippers instead of rafting shoes, I knew we were screwed. At the lip of the gorge, we got our temple-pinching helmets, cracked paddles, and life jackets that felt like Louis XVI style corsets (and smelled like they hadn’t been washed since the French Revolution, too). We tottered down the metal slatted stairs into the gorge. After bouldering big black rocks and waiting for the boat to be blown up, our team of 8 saddled up and started practicing our paddling. With Kazi at the helm yelling “We’re not mov-ING!” as we went at what felt like full speed ahead like a drunkenly uncoordinated centipede, I wouldn’t say it was a strong start. But as we rowed deeper into the Boiling Pot, the view of Victoria Falls crashing down with the sunlight coming through the mist was spectacular. The big scaly crocs watching us flail along the river must have agreed.

It had begun. After Rapid No. 1’s enormous churning waves, we asked Kazi, “What was that one?? A five?” He shook his head. “Complimentary rapid. No number.” Shit.

As we approached Rapid No. 5, “Stairway to Heaven,” uneasy after the barely-made-the-four-before, Kazi laid it on thick. “This is going to be a 16 foot drop. When I say paddle hard, I need you to paddle. Hard. When I tell you to get down, I need you to get. Down.” The young couple next to us whispered panic. Her longsleeved black and white striped shirt and knee-length Jorts were not quite ready for Adventure. Sorry, sis-tah. You’re about to be drinking some wat-tah. But me, I grew up in the ocean. I can take a watery tumble or two, no problem. Bring it on, baby.

“HARDER! HARDER!” The drunken centipede tried to sober up its flailing paddles. Barraged by a thousand fire hydrants, I was tumbling, kicking my now-heavy TOMS furiously for air, grasping my paddle as my only weapon against this anaconda that had just engulfed me, and my lungs. Just when I thought I’d gone blind and drowned, another snack for the crocs, my face exploded to the surface. But only for a second before the white thrashing beast took me down again. Bobbed back up, gulping, then down again. Back up, a gasp of half-air, half-water. My own boat out of sight, I was alone in the battle. Zambezi 1. Alli 0.

Or maybe even -1. Pushed down again, but this time by two hands reaching out for the shoulders of my life jacket. Down and buoyed up, over the roll of the side, face down into the raft’s floor full of drowned beetles. Rescue! Pulling my matted hair out of my eyelashes and my helmet up from my chapped chin, I was certainly impressing the boat full of studly young South Africans whose muscles I had just spit up Zambezi water on.

I sat cross-legged at the bow with a front row seat for the next few rapids. But without a paddle (or my dignity), I was feeling more like Elian Gonzalez than Rose in Titanic as I waited for my heartbeat to return to my chest.

A pog on the playground, I got traded back into team Kazi just in time for Rapid No. 7, Gulliver’s Travels. Kazi wasn’t a big fan of positive reinforcement and the “WE’RE NOT MOVING! HARD-ER!” hadn’t exactly worked the last time, so he used the fear factor. “We can NOT go over on this one guys. There is a very, very big hole. A very, very huge hole that we can NOT go into. We need to take her from the very far right, or else we are in very, very big trouble.” I thought of Ms. Meeks’ 9^th grade English class when she banned us from using the word “very” because she said it was devoid of meaning and just lent itself to exaggeration. But in this case, I think Kazi meant every “very.” We paddled like hell.

And yet somehow, the hole was like a magnetic portal to the underworld drawing us in. The boat started to tip, steeper, steeper, until we were vertical in the slope of this “hole.” And when we say “hole,” it was a giant vortex that looked more like the Cracken’s front door than a river rapid. We managed to only lose one of Team Kazi off the bow, though. Casualty of war.

I don’t quite know how to describe the absurdity of the waves that followed. Swallowing the entire boat whole in a flurry of foam, flinging us into the boat like fish flopping for air caught in a fisherman’s net on deck. Doom.

Nineteen rapids and a torturous climb up the Gorge later, I was back on land but felt like I was tumbling through the rapids bareback. Until I got a Zambezi beer in hand. Picked up a Ten Trillion Dollar bill from a peddler representing the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe and a certificate that read:

Alli McKee successful survived the biggest, meanest, white water in the world – the mighty Zambezi River, in nothing more than a rubber raft.”

I felt like sending them both to Obama with a "You're Welcome" note to make his day.

After sleeping in past our 4pm alarm and waking up half naked tangled in a towel and a mosquito net, I piece together that I must have picked the bed over the shower, and wow, am I sunburned. But a cool, refreshing shower isn’t in the cards for us tonight, because you have to pump the handle up and down for 50 degree Celsius water to spurt out in boiling bursts. Yelping in pain trying to decide which hurts worse, the burning water, my burned skin, or my bloodied rope-burned knuckles, I find myself wishing for the Zambezi.