The Spread

I dug up some pics from Facebook of our little home on the river. First up, the front gate of Camp Cara del Indio:


I brought my 2001 Wavesport EZ down with me thinking it'd be the easiest thing in the world to sell in Chile. As you can see, they treat '01 Wavesports like Our Lord Jesus: not a good marketplace indicator.

Here's a happy picture of the quincho and tent city:


Joel moved straightaway into the quincho itself. Joel is either inside on his paco pad on the floor or in his hammock strung between two posts, also inside. I felt like an asshole and set up my tent. Joel didn't and I'm in my tent and feeling pretty bitter about it.

Here's the Indio himself, on the rocks across the river:


I'm hoping someone took a picture of the whole farm from a rise out on the road. I thought about taking that shot every day I was there but the spot was at least, like, a 10 minute walk away, and as I mentioned I didn't have that kind of time.

For some more shots, check out Raoul Collenteur's website. If Raoul were American, we'd have put him on so much Ritalin he'd have been brain-dead. Instead, he turned out as hyperactive, hyperintelligent eighteen year old Dutch kid that likes kayaking and girls. When things got really slow around camp, he'd take off into the woods giggling to himself with a machete he bought in Honduras and come back a half hour later with a stack of bamboo fronds or some kindling. He also figured out how to make solitaire a three-player game. Check out the Futa entry and the Pucon entry for some good photos.

Blogging is hard.

Finally, some goods

This little project failed terribly while Joel and I were in Chile. That's my fault. I could blame Joel for bringing a film camera (those still exist?) but really I had my own technical difficulties, and between lying in hammocks and paddling, there just wasn't much room to get pictures up--or internet access.

But now I'm reincarnating this site into a photo dump as the media starts to trickle in. To start, there's a video on YouTube that's got Joel surfing in the second or third frame:



Actually, I just figured it out. Joel, Steve Keaveny and I had just come over the border from our Pucon/Patagonian booze-cruise recess-epic, and then spent about four hours trying to hitch a ride back to camp (that's a pretty short wait for this part of the world). Finally, right as it was getting dark, the guy in this video



and his wife and their daughter, just arrived from Santiago, stopped and packed us and our stuff into their subcompact. I remember strapping our paddles diagonally across the roof rack, with our backpacks on top of those, and driving 35 potholed kilometers to camp with the little car bottomed out, sharing Escudos in the back seat.

One more for good measure:



This rapid starts with a good long class IV entrance before funneling into Mundaca and mini-Mundaca, two massive holes at the bottom. The best line, seen here, is to run the nuts and plow into the holy-shit-holes head on. They're huge, and terrifying from shore, but there's so much water running through them that they'll *usually* flush quickly. I liked to run it like the second guy, upside-down, until my skirt started trying to implode as it wore out.

More to come.

Joe

Sobrequipo

I finally made it to the Futa, arriving three days after Joel on Dec. 19th. Getting here was an adventure in itself--a five-day marathon of busses and hostels and hitchiking, all with my kayak in tow (literally, bungeed onto a tiny folding Samsonite luggage cart) and my Spanish lost somewhere between the airport in Santiago and my junior year of high school. From Santiago I headed directly south to Osorno, falling asleep at dusk in the city and waking at dawn in what looked like the Willamette Valley. From there, I headed east and up into the Andes, cresting at a dusty high alpine border crossing before dropping into the resort town of Bariloche, Argentina. After two days in Bariloche, I headed south to Esquel. leaving the forests of the Lakes District for the high plains of northern Patagonia. The crosswinds whistled over the roof of the bus. From Esquel it was another bus back up to the Chilean border, a small municipal van to the town of Futaleufu, and a day hitchhiking with six Israelis to camp.

We´re camped 30km from town the only major road here, a single-lane gravel route that roughly follows the Futaleufu River, on a fully-functioning ranch next to a play wave. We live out of a quonset plumbed with fresh water, and share our pasture with sheep, horses, chickens, turkeys, and the occasional farm dog. This camp is the rare piece of budget real estate along a river run mostly by large rafting companies. As such, it´s a central point for visiting kayakers--first a group of Argentines, now a growing group of Russians--with whom we´ve paddled almost every day.

The river itself is spectacular. The turqouise water pinballs through the valley with amazing energy. The current surges and boils. Eddy lines are thick and constantly changing. Waves tower 7 or 8 feet, sometimes green, sometimes crashing. It is an absolute blast to paddle. I´m sticking to the class IV section for a while, while Joel has paddled the Terminator section upstream and is already looking for harder lines. My USB cable is missing, so pictures will have to wait. Until then, imagine paradise.

ciao

And I'm off

Writing regularly again feels a bit like waking up in the morning, so I'll try to get through the grogginess as quickly as possible. Tomorrow I'll be in the air southbound to Santiago with a boat, a paddle, and as little of everything else as possible. From there, I'll be traveling further south through Argentina, over the Andes, and back into Chile at the northern edge of Patagonia to the Futaleufu River. I'm anticipating this leg to be the most difficult of the trip: solo, with my Spanish rustier than a sunken ship and 100 lbs. of awkward gear.

My mental image of the Futa, formed mostly by the movie Paddlequest, is just like Happy Gilmore's "happy place," except that the girl in lingerie with two pitchers of beer is Chilean and the midget dressed up like a cowboy is Chris Spelius. However it turns out, this should get me through 20 hours of bus travel.

Get stoked...