The plan was to swing by the Warehouse, grab some nifty floatation devices to keep ourselves (and the beers) afloat. We would leave one car parked at EIT with the other at the top of the Tutaekuri, and spend the next hour gently floating back down.
Instead we arrived at the river mid-afternoon, much later than intended. With the Warehouse out of adult-sized floaties we had a boogie board, two child floaties shaped like stingrays, and three noodles tied together with wool (the Warehouse was also out of string) between five of us.
The first thing we noticed - it wasn't very deep.
Flatmate #1's boyfriend had suggested the Tutaekuri because he knows about things like water levels, flow, and quality, and it was likely to be the best at ticking all three boxes. It might have been, but I had pictured us floating in water a bit deeper than calf-level.
Still we were undeterred, and it was a blast - for the first 200m.
Flatmate #1 zoomed on her boogie board while Flatmate #2 and I had a merry time on our matching stingrays. The same couldn't be said for Flatmate #3 and my boyfriend.
The river float was Flatmate #3's idea, but she had stayed out late the night before. She was also the only one without a floatie, so was more crawling than swimming along, to her credit barely wincing as her knees hit the rocky riverbed.
My boyfriend however – who is six foot two, weighs as much as a rugby player, and was trying to float on the three-noodle-wool contraption - was struggling.
Flatmate #2 shared her stingray with Flatmate #3, while I handed over my $15 floatie for my boyfriend's noodle raft - which at least acted as a buffer against the rocky riverbed.
For a while it was smooth sailing - having our backs warmed by the sun, and the refreshing water cooling us off. Occasionally we "beached" in the shallows, and had to wince-walk across the rocks, but this was worth it for the spots of deep water and small rapids.
After an hour and a half the novelty was gone. Knees were bruised, feet were sore, tempers were fraying. Things unravelled quickly - Flatmate's #2 and #3 were lagging behind, I had stumbled into a wasps nest, and we were all hungry.
Our only form of "technology" was Flatmate #1's watch, which told us how long it had taken us to travel such a small distance, and ticked down how long we had before the sun went down.
Two hours in, we hadn't reached the halfway point.
I started thinking about how long I could survive in the bush. I'm an ex-Girl Guide, and have watched plenty of Bear Grylls. My boyfriend and I plotted which flatmate we would eat first.
We were wandering deliriously, stumbling over rocks and falling back into the water, when we spotted something. Dots of colour on the horizon. People.
I signalled to Flatmate #1 to ask for a phone to ring her boyfriend and ask him to pick us up. She didn't know his number.
It turned out we were close to the halfway point carpark. EIT, they said, was just around the next river bend.
There was some discussion about battling on, but the thought of facing another hour without food, warmth, on disintegrating floatation devices was enough to send us stumbling to the carpark, and hitching a ride back to Flatmate #1's car.
Wet, cold, and bedraggled, nearly four hours after we set off, a hearty meal at the Puketapu Pub saw our sanity begin to return.
The manta rays and noodles have been hidden in the shed. They might come out again one day, once our bruises have healed, and the memory's faded.
