Río Futaleufú

I got up early to use half the eggs from yesterday, some of the butter and the bread. My egg sandwich turned out to be pretty spectacular, and it wasn't long before the others were up and about, and ready to go. Down at Fly George we were loaded into buses and driven up to the beginning of the White Water Rafting where the view was really good. I hadn't brought my camera (I took that picture with another persons camera) as rafting gets pretty wet, but I of course hadn't thought about leaving my camera in the van (but then what would be the point).

The rafting on the Río Futaleufú is phenomenal... I have often read that it is the best white water rafting in the entire world, our guides who are very professional have traveled all over the world rafting, and they said that this was in their opinion the best place in the world. The guide on my boat (Christian) mentioned 3 rivers as being the best: Río Futaleufú, Zambesi and the White Nile; and of those 3 the Río Futaleufú is supposedly the best.

Now I had a fantastic time there, the rafting was incredible, I simply had so much fun going down there. We had 15 or so rapids, ranging between class 3+ and class 5; there was a single class 2 but we swam through that one (really incredible feeling). It is very hard to describe rafting, you go rapidly (pun intended) down a river skipping over massive waves and getting high sides (no tipping over though). There were just so many rapids, and they all had massive waves, rocks sticking out, extremely fast flowing water and just generally a very fun feeling about them. Unlike other people however I didn't get an adrenalin rush, that takes a bit more.

But one thing I would have loved to be possible is bringing along a camera, the scenery was absolutely stunning. The mountain background, the mountains on the sides, the cliffs sticking out, the wild river... Everything about it just seemed so perfect.

But it came to an end (although not before Rachel had fallen overboard in a rapid called "Mas o menos") and we had to go back to Futaleufú.

Instead of going to Chaíten and further on to Chiloé, I changed my mind within 5 minutes and decided to go across the border into Argentina with Dave and go to El Bolsón and then futher on to Bariloche after that, partly because I have so far not heard anything positive about Chiloé, and because I was gonna go to El Bolsón and Bariloche anyway.

So back in Futaleufú Dave and I went to buy bus tickets to the border (for Monday, there are no Sunday buses to anywhere) , and we then decided to eat out again (as it was the last night Eyal and Rachel would be there) and Eddie would then cook dinner the following day. But when we finally got around to eating time, it took forever to find an open place that wasn't ridiculously expensive, so we ended up eating at the same place as the previous day. However we were 5 people, and the chef had only dough for 2 pizza's, so Eddie and I had steaks instead.

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I would like you to try and play this song while reading about my rafting experience, and trying to imagine what's it like.

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