Weally Wet Week.

It has rained this week. Non-stop. Normally it means that business slows down a bit, for some reason nobody seems to understand that the rain is the perfect weather to go whitewater kayaking because you get drenched anyway! With the rain some more interesting rivers come up, and with the dip in work we normally get out to play on a few really fun rivers. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) we were very busy this week, with kayak classes, double kayak trips and ducky trips.This means that we didn't get so much time to do personal paddling, but one group of clients an interesting experience with me when we got on a river that was rising rapidly and had risen around 80cm whilst we were on it!


The New Year actually started off pretty sunny to be fair. I had a day long kayak school, one-to-one with a Chilean guy who wanted to become a kayaking instructor. For the kayak school days we spend the morning teaching basic skills on the lake and then run a grade 1/2 section in the afternoon (sometimes with some grade 2/3 rapids tagged on the end).


We also took advantage of the good weather to take the boss's son, 6yrs old, out on the river for his first whitewater experience. It took us a while to outfit the boat so that he wouldn't just fall out in the rapids, and he absolutely loved it. But after a promising start, the weather soon turned bad.

      

Heavy wind and sideways rain. Joy.

The rubbish weather led me inside to do some video editing, the first time I've edited a kayaking video, a promo for the double kayaking trips. It's a very dull process.

I also had to travel around two hours to Temuco to get a yellow fever vaccination. They didn't have it anywhere in the country it turns out... Damn. Guess I'll have to figure out another way of getting that vaccination before I head off on my next paddling adventure to Ecuador. It ended up being a day long trip in which I achieved absolutely nothing, the only silver lining was that raspberries are really cheap in Temuco, so the journey back was good at least.

Before I found raspberries...

Three exciting things have happened in the last few days. I will list them in order of excitingness (according to me anyway).

1) We finally sorted out a drying system for wet kit, no more wearing wet kit!!!

2) Went out with some of the staff for drinks a few days ago and we went back to somebody's house to chill. She has a pet hedgehog, yes, the little spiky things! To be honest, I felt sorry for the poor thing, it's not an ideal pet at all. However, it was cool to see one up close (Daniel might not agree with me).

3) Paddled a new section of river!!! This was obviously going to be my most exciting news. We took advantage of the sudden rise in the river levels and I went to paddle the Upper Liucura with Ben. It's not a hard section but the first rapid is over a kilometre long without any let-up, absolutely awesome.

Always a pleasure to explore a new section

I'm starting a new section of this blog too, a section relevant to the shop-life here. We have a manikin to sell volcano trips, he's called Manny. When we close the shop, Manny gets left in all sorts of compromising positions. I will be chronicling the 'Tales Of Manny' and what he gets up to with some photos. Here are the first two:

Shameless.

Vogue.

This week is due to be crazy busy and I'll be spending a lot of hours coaching and guiding on the local rivers in preparation for my trip to Ecuador. Can't wait!!!