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