Going for a quick dip

Another losing battle in the morning against the urge to just stay in bed, cocooned comfortably in a little world of warmth. However, an eventual emergence was necessary, so I could go rafting. Now, I haven't done a great number of adventure activities as such out here, largely because they're still relatively expensive and I'm trying to travel on a tighter budget than I traditionally have done, but I'd decided that it was about time I treated myself a little, and added another continent to those in which I had gone zooming down rapids in a glorified inflatable. Once the drive out to the river, a fair bit of it down dirt roads, was completed, we faced the inevitable discomfort and mild embarrassment of getting kitted out for the ride. First the wetsuit, not usually the most flattering of garments, and not the most comfortable one to be wearing whilst still dry and with the temperature in the high 20s or low 30s, along with waterproof booties that are almost inevitably not quite the right size (leading to much sloshing in the rare excursions onto dry land later). Then a kagoul and some deeply unattractive shorts to be worn over the suit, largely to try and avoid cuts and abrasions to the material underneath. Then the additional bulk of the lifejacket, which also ratchets up the heat factor since it needs to be done up tight to be effective, and finally the bucket helmet. It leaves you looking and feeling an utter berk, and this deep standing level of unattractiveness plays its part in my ongoing refusal to buy photos or anything like that from rafting.

At any rate, once we were kitted out and had scrambled down to the riverside, we helped with manhandling the rafts down (a process interrupted by the passage of an itinerant cow through our midst as one of the rafts was being lowered from the road on a rope...) and then had the safety briefing, delivered by our safety kayaker for the day, Josh, an American. We were then split into crews and handed over to our river guides, which left Guy and Magali (a French couple), me and an Austrian called Chris with the smiling Max, a Chileño who luckily could handle himself quite happily in English, though by the end of the trip we were getting most commands in both English and Spanish. The actual rapids themselves were a mixed bag, a few grade 2s and 3s, a couple of 4s, a "4 and a half", and a grade 6 around which we had to walk while the boats were coaxed through, as 6s are too dangerous to run. Our trip was enlivened somewhat by the fact that Max got knocked out the back of the boat as we were going through the 4.5, much to the gleeful hilarity of the other guides (for whom, by tradition, he would now have to buy beers), leaving us ploughing on down the line we had entered without any steerage guidance until Chris had hoiked him back into the boat! It all worked out ok in the end, though, and it was a fun afternoon.

Once saely back in town, I grabbed the materials from the supermarket to make myself some dinner, and then lounged around reading in a hammock back at the hostel until I left like cooking, getting chatting in the process with a couple of Irish girls, Kate and Grainne, who'd just arrived and were going to do the volcano climb the next morning. Despite a certain amount of suggestion, I declined to join the volcano ascent, on grounds of cost, laziness and concern for my dodgy knees, and set about brewing up yet more Bolognese sauce, my default option for a home-made dinner on the road, and also partaking of a little of the local Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon - my conversion to an appreciation of the joys of red wine continues apace. Later on, I popped over to Mamas and Tapas to have a drink with the Irish girls, and we all ended up chatting for a while with Trey, a somewhat inebriated member of the river guiding fraternity (it's ok it was his day off the next day...) before heading back for a pretty early night.