Day 26: Rafting down the Urumbamba

Today was our last in Peru, and the last abroad, so we had to fill it up with excitement: rafting. Originally, we were hoping to go in the morning, but times got shifted around, so we ended up scheduling the trip for 1:00pm through another guest lodge. Thus, we had a few hours to kill before the trip. Ming's mission: find some corn on the cob. So we set out from our guesthouse in search of the snack.

We roamed the square, asking the locals where we could buy corn. The square is in disarray at the moment, as it's being spruced up.

After bouncing from shop to shop in search of corn, we finally ended up at a local vegetable market. At least, I thought it was a vegetable market, until I walked around a corner and found myself staring directly into the eyes of a severed cow head. I'll spare you the picture. In any case, no corn here. We were having a particularly hard time expressing what we wanted to buy, because the term "maize" actually means the dried corn, not the boiled corn on the cob. We finally figured out that "choco", was the term we were looking for. We originally thought it meant chocolate, so we refused a few friendly locals who offered to take us to the nearest choco seller. We finally found some ourselves at the train station. Ming was happy.

On our way back, we walked by some local taxi/van drivers gambling on the sidewalk.


As we were walking around town, Ming decided to head into another shop that was advertising rafting on the Urumbamba, just to compare prices. We payed $30 each for our guided tour down the river. Turns out, the little shop was only charging $25 for what looked like the same trip! Ming seized the opportunity to nab the cheaper deal using her broken (but still fairly impressive) Spanish. Through the conversation, we learned that we could leave at the exact same time as we were originally going to, and that we would be rafting with two other tourists. It wasn't until a few minutes later that we figured out that the other tourists were actually us! It turns out that the lodge we had booked the trip through, had just used these guys. I guess you pay a $10 premium for dealing in English. Ming wasn't having any of that, so we canceled the trip through the lodge, and booked directly through these guys. My only regret is that we didn't get to go rafting with ourselves.

In any case, we zoomed off promptly at 1:00 and drove a few miles outside of town to the launch point. Ming and I watched as our guide and his friend did all the hard work of blowing up the raft:

Job well done.
The raft-guide's son wasn't helping either, so we didn't feel bad.


Soon, we were off, our guide in the back and the two of us perched up front.

The guide narrated through the calm waters, telling us about Incan ruins that lined the river banks. The bridge in the background of the next shot was fortified with a large bolder that the Incan's had rolled into the middle of the river to divert the powerful water around the sides of its base.

The rapids around this time of year were not particularly high. There were two class 3 rapids, and a couple of class two rapids, but nothing too scary. Still, this was Ming's first time rafting, so she kept an eye out:

Since it was just the two of us and the guide, we had quite a bit of maneuverability. There was a nice eddy next to one of the class 3 rapids, so we snapped a picture.
Little did we know, the guide had plans for that rapid. Since there were just two of us, he found it easy to maneuver the raft facing upstream and into the rapid. He told us to paddle as hard as possible, until the front of the raft was submerged into the oncoming river, and the back end popped up. We surfed the rapid for a full minute, as he expertly kept us from flipping. The guide told us to scoot forward as much as possible, and we literally had the river flowing into our laps, as the back-end popped up even more. When we popped out of the rapid, we paddled over to the eddy to rest. Then, after about a minute, we repeated the whole thing again; it was a blast. I'd say we surfed that rapid five or six times before finally moving on. Another 10 minutes of light paddling, and we reached our destination, a little river-side pull-out... which also happened to be a farmer's back yard.


With the excitement of the day out of the way, we chose to relax as the evening came around. For dinner, we went back to our a restaurant we'd found the first night, just across the river from Hostel Sauce. And so ended our last full day in Peru.