My five unforgettable days whitewater kayaking in Chile: The river showed me who’s in charge

There’s a huge rock in the middle of Casa de Piedra and I’ve just kayaked around the wrong side of it. You’re supposed to go right. That’s the line. But today, my fifth and final day of a whitewater kayaking trip on Chile’s Río Futaleufú, I’ve ended up left.

I thought I had the rapid figured out, I’ve paddled it every day, but a lateral wave knocked me and my friend Bartosz, who was in front of me, off course. Now the two of us are swirling around in an eddy, a circular current of water, behind the big rock trying to figure out what to do next.

A left line down the rapid exists, but I don’t know what it is. All I know is that the rest of the rapid contains several powerful holes (recirculating whitewater) that you do not want to paddle into.

“I think I can make it back to the right,” I say to Bartosz as we consider our options.

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“Are you sure,” he says. “I don’t think so.”

I should have listened to him. Instead I break out into the flow and start to charge right. But I’m like Homer Simpson attempting to jump Springfield Gorge on a skateboard. My effort against the flow is hilariously inadequate. About halfway across I’m way off course. With my bow now pointing downstream, I’m exactly where I don’t want to be, and I drop straight into the big hole that I meant to avoid.

I hit the foam, flip backwards, and get thrashed around by the recirculating whitewater. I hang on and eventually surf my way out only to drop straight into a second hole for another beating. This time my spray deck, the thing that stops the water from swamping your kayak, blows off.

With my boat now full of water and bobbing like a cork, I decide to bail and take my chances swimming, only to swim into a third, smaller, hole that recirculates me a couple of times.

Eventually, exhausted, I float to the end of the rapid where my friends are waiting to pick up the pieces. They get me back into my boat, physically unscathed but certainly humbled.

My journey to this point had been a long one. The most straightforward route to the Futaleufú river from Ireland is to fly to Buenos Aires in Argentina and then take an internal flight to Esquel, from where Futaleufú town lies a short distance across the border. But for some reason, at the end of December, return flights were coming in at more than €6,000 – so it was the long way for me.

Starting in Dublin, I flew via Toronto to Santiago. From the Chilean capital I then flew 900km south to the town of Puerto Montt where I changed airports and caught another flight across the Gulf of Ancud to the coastal town of Chaitén in northern Patagonia. Finally, I took a three-hour bus to Futaleufú where my Irish friends – already in the country kayaking for a couple of weeks – picked me up.

But the whole thing was nearly derailed by a delay in Santiago airport because of a “scheduled” fumigation of all the luggage on my flight. Chile takes its agricultural security seriously. You’re not permitted to bring so much as an undeclared pistachio nut into the country. To make sure of this, a happy spaniel greets you on arrival and gives you a good sniff as you walk by. He jumped all over me, of course, tail wagging, prompting a less excited-looking official to direct me to a counter where another customs official stood at a desk full of confiscated bananas.

I explained that there had once been an orange in my hand luggage and that’s probably what set the dog off. The official waved me away and I walked into the baggage hall to wait for my luggage.

My next flight was on a separate booking with a turnaround time of two hours and 20 minutes. An hour and 40 minutes after we landed, my fumigated bag finally tumbled on to the luggage carousel. I grabbed it and sprinted to the domestic terminal where I just about made my plane to Puerto Montt.

Founded by German immigrants in the mid-19th century, Puerto Montt is now a workaday port town on Reloncaví Sound. It acts as a transport hub and a gateway to Chilean Patagonia. The fastest way to get from there to Chaitén is to fly, but to do this you need to change airports.

Marcel Marchant Airport sits off a gravel road on the outskirts of Puerto Montt, about a 30-minute drive from the town’s main airport. The terminal building resembles a small warehouse, or a large shed, and refreshments are provided from a nearby trailer.

A small regional airline plies the route to Chaitén in a single-engine Cessna Caravan that seats nine passengers. Cruising at an altitude of about 3,500 feet, you can enjoy fine views of the islands and the glistening waters below on the 40-minute flight.

I arrived in the sleepy town of Chaitén three minutes after the last bus to Futaleufú had left. If I had made it on time, it would have been a miraculously successful linking up of every bit of my journey from Ireland. Instead, I had to figure out a different way to the river. I spotted a pickup truck full of kayaks and figured it must be heading to the Futa. But when I found its custodians sitting on the ground outside a takeaway, eating empanadas, they said they had no room for another passenger.

With no apparent alternatives, I ordered a taxi, which turned out to be a large minibus, at a cost of about €200 – “Very expensive,” explained the man in the tourist office who booked it for me.

But the drive offered plenty of time to admire the Futaleufú Valley – “a landscape painted by God”, as early inhabitants described it. From the front seat I had a fine view of the glaciers, lush forests and snow-capped peaks of this part of northern Patagonia. Turning left at what remains of the settlement of Villa Santa Lucia, devastated by a 2017 landslide, we skirted the southern shore of Lago Yelcho for 30km before driving alongside the Río Futaleufú.

The first thing you notice about the Futa is its colour, a vibrant turquoise created by glacial till. It’s so blue it looks like a child’s drawing of a river. It begins its journey in the glacial snow melt of Argentina’s Los Alerces National Park and flows 105km to Lago Yelcho (crossing the Chilean border along the way), after which it continues as the Rio Yelcho before emptying into the Gulf of Corcovado near Chaitén.

The section that’s famous among whitewater kayakers starts near Futaleufú town and flows southwest for about 50km. It is packed with huge, high volume, continuous rapids, which range in difficulty from class two to class five – in other words, from easy and consequence-free to hard and very consequential indeed.

On the evening that I arrived, my friend Barry led me down the popular Bridge to Bridge section, a paddle of about 9km. When you only have a handful of days on a river, it’s worth paying for an expensive taxi if it gives you an extra day’s paddling.

That was the first of five unforgettable days on the Futa. By the end of the trip I thought I had the river pretty much figured out, and then I took that wrong turn on Casa de Piedra. But that’s the thing about whitewater kayaking, as soon as you forget who’s really in charge, the river is happy to remind you.

It was something to think about on the long journey home.