World Adventures- Africa, the UK and South America

28.03.10

Border Crossing, again bags off the truck but this time manually searched by immigration. The one sniffer dog at the border was very young and didnt climb onto the back of the truck as directed, instead enjoying lots of pats and attention from us.

Drove until 5pm today, arriving at Quelat National Park where there is a ‘hanging glacier’. Nice quite camp next to a loud river flowing off the glacier and lake upstream. Had a fire at dinner and roasted marshmallows. Also walked to the close view point of the glacier to have a look, but it was too dark to take photos. The glacier is not really hanging anymore, as it has receded quite a lot, but its in a beautiful setting and is still impressive to see.    

29.03.10

Woke up early and did the 3hr hike to the main hanging glacier view point, the walk only took about 1.5hrs in total. Also walked out to the view point from the lake and took some nice photos, very picturesque place.

Afternoon drive to Futalefeu, my tent buddy upgraded into a cabin so I had the tent to myself. I was on cook group and we made apricot chicken, it went down well, but we had to debone the chicken ourselves- or rather it was left for me to do. Not a very pleasant evening, lots of bickering between Dan and Chelsea in my cook group, lots of negative energy. Not the first time that Chelsea was being a bitch, but defiantly the worst of it to date. Its not fun being in my cook group, the two members that I have with me have no practical cooking experience, and frankly just don’t get along. It means that I feel like I have to lead the group, which would normally be fine, except that Chelsea has a fairly negative attitude the whole time, and its hard to get feed back on any of my suggestions as neither of them have much of a clue as to how to cook.

30.03.10

Breakfast from my cook group was yoghurt and granola, it worked well and meant little for us to clean up, especially since I was booked to go white water rafting.

The white water rafting in Futalefeu is the 3rd best in the world, and I throughly enjoyed every second of it. The rafting guide gave a very good saftey briefing, and gave us a good opportunity to practice actioning his calls before we attempted any of the rapids. Then before the approach to any of the rapids he would define the course through them that we wound need to take, explaining all of the dangers. We flipped on the 2nd rapid we went through, but it was intentional on his behalf, to ensure that we could get back into the raft should we come out somewhere more dangerous. I nearly fell on Bernie when we flipped, and the current of the water was far stronger than I expected. I had very little difficulty holding onto my paddle when I came out white water rafting in Vic Falls, but here it was a bit of a struggle. I managed to get hauled onto the saftey raft and jump back across to our raft before the next set of rapids, and although the water was freezing, the adrenaline made it great fun. There were a few very dangerous points along the river, like a wall with a half cave under it, that if you came out on that certain rapid, and went into the cave, the whole force of the river would be pushing you down and hard against the rock, and you would struggle to get oxygen. Overall the river was not as technical as Vic Falls, it only lasted four hours, and only had one grade five rapid, but I enjoyed it 10 times more. On the 3rd last rapid, the only grade five rapid, our guide explained that we would need to go around a giant rock in the center of the river, and also explained about the various whirlpools either side of the rock. As we approached the rapid, for what ever reason, we lost our original line, and banged head on with the giant rock. In the process of doing this, the impact caused our guide in the back seat to crash forward into the back of me, and then bounce out the back of the raft. Bernie and I both looked at each other in horror as it appeared that we had completely lost the guide, and we were only at the start of the rapid. Fortunately, the guide had managed to grab the rope on the edge of the raft, and was only in the water for about 10seconds before he climbed back in and started yelling directions at us. We made it though the rapid, and were a little disappointed that there were no other big challenges to come before we departed the raft.

As I was camping, I had to use a wood fulled boiler to heat the water of the camping shower. Fortunately, due to the fact that I was on cook group the night before, Simon, one of the 5 other people camping, had kept the fire stoked for me, so I managed to have a boiling hot shower. I was therefore worried that I would be freezing the whole time that I was rafting, and would further freeze when I got back to camp and had to start the fire, and  wait 30mins for the water to heat enough to be warmish. Luckily I had asked our tour leader if she could please ask someone to start the boiler around lunch time, so that those of us camping and rafting (which was only myself), could jump straight into a hot shower to warm up, as the weather was only about 14 degrees, and the water was freezing. Thankfully someone had started the boiler, and it was luck warm- but much warmer than my own body temperature, so I had a very quick shower and then got dressed into my fleece.

Dinner that night was a curry, it was hot and made me feel really sick, I just cant eat curry. I ended up going to be about 45mins after dinner with cramps in my stomach and feeling like I wanted to throw up. I hate curry!!!