Chilean Travels 1

Well, here you have it folks - the first of many travel updates from Chile...

It started about a week ago, back in bitter cold Canada, with me stressing about weight limits on luggage. Here was the dilemma, I had to get a creek and play boat down to Chile with me, along with clothes, paddling gear, safety gear, 2 computers and a video camera all in 2- 23 kg pieces of luggage. In the end I decided to wear all my clothes into the airport, so that they didn’t take up weight of coarse, and over pack my playboat by 7 kg. With my luck they didn’t even weigh the boats instead I payed $400 to get the boats on the plane. About 15 mins before boarding the plane I got called to the front desk and was told that my boats weren’t able to fit on the plane and they would be sent to Santiago a day late via Miami.

After a cramped flight on a shitty little jet to JFK NY and a long ass flight to Santiago, I was in Chile. That was the good news, the bad news was I had to wait an entire day in Santiago till my boats arrived and I speak “un pocito Espanol” (If your worse off then me that means “a little Spanish”). Thankfully I was saved by Mariann who let me in on a useful tip and within a few hours I was on a Tur Bus to Pucon to meet up with Tyler Curtis and Mariann Saether.

Here are a few useful facts I’ve learnt about traveling I’d like to share.
1) Never wear 4 layers of clothes to an airport regardless of how much weight it saves from your bags, especially if you have to drag two heavy ass boats through immigration to the oversized baggage drop off.
2) No matter, how many times you go or what you say, putting boats on a plane is different every time. Just go early, be polite, and take money and you will be all good.
3) If the airline tells you they have misplaced or re-routed your luggage (boats) thats actually a blessing in disguise. That means they have to get it to you regardless of where you are, therefore its a free ticket to travel as far away from the airport as possible hassle free of the burden of traveling with boats. Sweet!, you just need a contact phone number or an address to get them sent to. (Thanks Mariann!)
4) Traveling to new places kicks ass!

My first day in Pucon didn’t exactly go well. We waited till noon for my boats to arrive and then got a call saying they wouldn’t show up till tomorrow (which in Chilean means day after tomorrow). After borrowing some gear from friends here we headed to the Rio Puesco. Driving there we lost a boat off the truck roof, then about 3/4 of the way there TC and Mariann realized they had forgotten essential gear so we had to go back. Plan B was to drink some beer at a hot spring, driving about 40 mins to get there we found a hot pool with about 4 inches of water in it and some old chilean dude shoveling gravel in it. Feeling defeated we salvaged what was left of the day by driving to another hot spring and drink many beer.

Using borrowed gear I finally got to get wet, we paddled the Rio Puesco. A few hundred meters into this run the river picks up her skirt and dives head first into a very long, steep, continuous, messy section of whitewater (Tres Troncos - Three tree trunks). The river doesn’t really let up till the take out 2.6 km down steam, after dropping 133 m of gradient. The crazy thing is, thats an average gradient of 51 m/km and the river doesn’t have one drop over 3 m. The picture below is typical of the entire run, lots of boofs, slot moves and small eddies. All the makings of a classic.

Later that day we headed to the Ojos de Caburga a sweet park and huck and ran it 3 times. The pictures tell a hundred words but I’ve got One ..... Fuck Ya!

My boats finally arrived the next day just in time for us to go up to the rio Palguin, the classic of all classics in Chile. Not much can be said about the Palgiun except WOW!, lots of great vertical drops, a few portages, crystal clear water and amazing scenery.

With water levels dropping in the Pucon area we head south for some big water. And we found just that with the Rio Fuy. Paddling the upper section we found our selves in big volume (or at least for the river gradient) rapids with an abundance of big waves and big holes. A few km in is the water fall, a sweet 20 ft’er with some nasty shit below. We ran the fall and made a quick eddy out to portage the section below that contained a turbo big hole. A few more big drops and we took out, drove 4 km or so down the road and put in for the lower Fuy, a continuous big water class 3 play ground. Due to rainy conditions we couldn’t get any photos or footage of the upper - sorry you’ll have to use your imagination.

I am currently chilling in a Cabana waiting for the sun to come out so we can go paddle the Rio Gol Gol (or something like that).

Stay Tuned.....

Tyler Fox
Photos by: Tyler Curtis & Mariann Saether

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