Futaleufu

ok... digging a long way back here, but hopefully I´ll get the blog up to date soon. After Chaiten, we limped our way to Futaleufu (see previous blogs for details) where we happened upon a fantastic and cheap hostel. We had decided to stay a couple of days since the Futaleufu river is classed as one of the top 3 in the world for white water rafting and Kayaking.

After our first night, we rocked up to a tour agency the next day and got straight on board for a kayaking trip. It was on the Rio Espolon rather than the Futaleufu, but given our practically non-existant kayaking experience, the class 2 & 3 rapids of the Espolon were the perfect level for us.

We had an absolutely fantastic day paddling around on the stunning blue/green river. It was even hot enough that we jumped into the icy water a couple of times... we probably needn´t have though as both of us managed to tip over in the (relatively) tame rapids we were negotiating. All in all, it was fantastic to forget our recent bike problems and have some serious fun!

That night we had been informed that there was a free concert by a famous Chilean Folkloric band Las Jaivas (The Crabs) at the soccer field. So along we went and were greeted by an intro more bizzare than I have ever seen... strange horns coupled with synthesiser and bizarre images of the Spanish Conquistadors abusing and attacking the indigenous people... That lasted for about 10 mins until the sound crackled and died... They tried a second time, but the same thing happened and they announced that they needed time to fix the ¨technical difficulties¨. After about 20 mins we left as we were exhausted from our big day. It was only on the way home that we noticed that they had blacked out half the town in order to supply enough power for the concert.... lol!

The next day we hit the real rapids of the Futaleufu for some white water rafting... again it was absolutely fantastic fun and on such a beautiful river! We were also very proud of the fact that we made it through the class 4 & 5 rapids without loosing a single person from the boat, despite having a couple of young children in our crew. We had watched while the 2 rafts after us both flipped on the 1 particularly difficult rapid of the course!

So that was Futaleufu, after which we crossed the border back to Argentina and headed up to San Carlos de Bariloche.