rapids

No adventure travel destination would ever take itself serious if it did not at least offer white water rafting. But there´s something new on the menu these days: Hydrospeed. Invented in France (where else), it entails swimming through rapids using a sort of body board. Irresistible!

Both rafting and hydrospeed are done on the Trancura river near Pucon. We did the hydrospeed in the morning on the lower part of the river, and rafting in the afternoon on the upper part. Logistically one would think it would make sense to do it the other way around, but alas, that´s the way the group bookings turned out.

The hydrospeed started with some basic instructions on a flat water section, followed by about 90 minutes of swimming through class II and III rapids. The IIs are fairly tame but the IIIs start to get exciting. Unfortunately each section of rapids was fairly short, but it was good fun anyway. I have no doubt that someone will introduce this to the X Games some time, and then I want to do more than class III!

Instruction. There´s not much to it.

Floating through a flat water section.

The rafting is done on the upper part of the Trancura where there are rapids up to class VI. The VI cannot be rafted, so everyone had to exit the raft, climb over rocks, and jump off of the rocks on the other side of the waterfall. Other than that it was a pretty standard rafting trip, except that at one point we waited for 45 minutes for one of the other rafts to become dislodged from a rock in the middle of the rapids.



And that, then, would conclude all the activities for this trip. I consider this month seized!