02/24/2010 White water rafting and Kashama Lodge

Here's the waterfall at Kashama Lodge in the morning

Here's the waterfall after the downpour. The water's real brown

Here we are rafting - duh

Here's the "wheelie, just moments before we went over!

Everyone slept in last night after our travels from Puerto Lopez. At 10:00 the guides for our rafting trip showed up at Kashama. We took our bus as it had more room and the guides led the way to the Baba were we commenced our rafting trip. It took us about an hour to get to the place where our rafts would be placed into the river. Along the way I struck up a conversation with Gregory, one of the guides for the trip. It turns out that he took the bus yesterday from The Amazon (12 hours) just to be there today for us. Not only that, he was leaving right after our excursion for a bus ride BACK to The Amazon for another trip there tomorrow. Think about that commute to a job – it sort of makes me think that our trip (long as it was yesterday) wasn’t really that bad. Gregory was born in The Amazon, is 24 years old and studied to be a certified nature guide in Ecuador. He is a world class rafter – he competed in South Korea for the title of Best White Water Rafter. I didn’t ask him how he did but obviously he knew what he was doing. We went through all of the usual rafting checks about commands and then WE pumped up the raft before we put it in the water. They made it seem that it would a good warm up exercise before we started up. Pretty Tom Sawyerish to me – I think they were just hot from pumping up the first raft.

Gregory was quite entertaining and he made us feel at ease in the water (literally). At one point he said “Alright, everybody in the water”. And we did it! The other raft apparently wasn’t as agreeable as they didn’t go in the drink on command. They did go in a couple of times by falling out of the raft though. I don’t know too much about the categories of white water rapids but these were purported to be 2-3. They seemed pretty robust to me! At another point he asked if we wanted to do a “trick”. Everybody got at the back end of the raft and Gregory attached a rope to the front and stood at the very end of the raft. He had us all lean forward and then back as much as we could. The end result was the raft doing a “wheelie” with the front end of the raft straight up in the air. Eventually we wound up past 90 degrees as we went completely over and wound up under the raft. It was no problem, we just relaxed and one by one we were pulled back into the raft after he righted it. Pretty cool and I must say I never did that one before.

Somewhere about 2 hours into the float a storm came up and it POURED! We were already pretty wet but it actually got a little uncomfortable after a while. We had agreed to extend our trip a little longer down the river after we had stopped for a break. Each time we thought we were through (a bridge would appear) marking a logical end point we were told it was just 30 more minutes. And of course this was Ecuadorian time so 30 minutes became much more. We finished after 4 hours and they told us we went 14 miles on the river. This was BY FAR the coolest rafting trip I’ve ever been on and how often do you get to raft in a river where the water’s not freezing and the rain wasn’t really a problem. The only thing from my view point was that the trip was a little too long.

Back to the Kashama Lodge where we just finished our dinner with the rain still crashing down. There’s little doubt that the waterfall that flows into the Kashama Lodge is a real one! When we got home the waterfall was flowing twice as much as it had in the morning. Plus the water is completely brown from all the mud and silt that is coming along with all the water. I have images from the morning and then later after the storm had started. Pretty amazing!

Ok, tomorrow is supposed to be a day at leisure until we check out at 4:00. I’ll believe that when I see it! After we check out we’re supposed to visit a indigenous tribe’s village (The Tschilla) known as the red haired people for the dye they apply to their hair. We thought we could do that after we checked out as it’s on the way to Tinlandia Resort, our next stop. By the way, sun burn is still pretty bad – it hurts to touch it and I feel pretty stupid. As usual, I’ll report more later - whenever that is. I hope to have internet access tomorrow – if not we will certainly have it in Quito the next night. Until then, Adios amigos y amigas!