Adventures in Cusco
My first day in Cusco I met up with Jodie, andy, Sofia and Peter that I had travelled with for a while in Bolivia. They were all planning on doing a rafting trip and after going with them to a couple of agencies and hearing more about the trip I was easily persuaded to change my plans and join them on that in a couple of days time. This gave us a bit of time to explore Cusco, a very touristy town where you are constantly hassled by people on the street trying to sell you stuff, other than that it is quite a nice place to spend a few days. We visited Saqsaywaman, an Inca site just outside the city. Apart from having a bit of a dubious guide, (I think I could have made up better information about the place than he did) it was an interesting place to go. We also visited the museum of childrens art, that has developed from a charity project in the schools in the villages around Cusco. The children have never seen any paintings or forms of art other than weaving so when they are told to paint something it is very strongly influenced by there cultural traditions and nothing like Western children would paint, both in terms of the subject and style.
After a day in the city we were ready for the early morning start for the rafting. We were to spend 3 days on the Apurimac river a few hours drive from the city. The drive itself was fairly exciting, on narrow tracks through the mountains with huge drops right by the side of the bus and big problems whenever we met a vehicle coming the other way. We arrived at the start, and had lunch while we got ready to go. First we were taught the basics of rafting and some safety procedures before we had a bit of time to practise on the river. So we soon ended up in the river practising what to do if we capsized. Luckily we had wetsuits and although the water was cold it was a nice sunny day, so we could dry out quickly if we hadn´t of kept getting wet again straight away. However within about 5 minutes of being ion the raft and capsizing once I had already lost one of the shoes I had brought in ther markey just a few houes earlier, leaving me with just one shoe for the 3 day trip.
After a bit of practising we set off down the river for a couple of hours rafting before reaching the first campsite. This was good fun, mainly class 2 and 3 rapids, so it was a good chance to get used to the rafting and it was good fun. Although having seen a few class 3 rapids I was starting to wonder what the promised class 5 rapids would be like. We had a nice evening at the first campsite, camping on a nice beach. We had a good dinner and campfire to keep warm.
The second day of the trip was a long day on the river. After an early start we were straight into the rapids. More grade 2 and 3 to start with. We trued a bit if raft surfing in one rapid which didn’t go so well, thanks to the guy paddling the cargo boat shouting the wrong instructions we nearly flipped the raft and ended up with 2 people falling in. Before lunch we experienced our first class 4 rapid and survived that without too many problems. There were also a few sections that were too dangerous to raft, where we had to walk round, which was a bit painful for me. Climbing over the rocks with just one shoe. By the end of the day my feet were a mess from the walking, sandfly bites and sunburn. Watching the guy in the safety kayak paddling down some of the hard sections and seeing the amount of work it took them to get the cargo raft down them was really impressive. We had lunch on another nice beech before continuing rafting for a few more hours in te afternoon. With some more class 3 and 4 rapids it was very exciting at times. This was mixed with calmer bits where we were able just to float down very beautiful sections of the canyon. We had another nice evening camping on a beach.
On the 3rd day we started out straight into some big rapids, nothing like getting soaked with cold water early in the morning to wake you up. In the first part of the morning we had a series of difficult rapids to get through, class 4 with a couple of class 5. All was going well until we went through one very shallow section and managed to get the raft stuck on 3 rocks. It took a lot of work from our guide and the guy from the safety kayak to eventually get us going without flipping the raft. After that it was the class 5 rapid which had a couple of really big drops in it where we just had to get down in the bottom of the raft and hold on. Despite this the force of the drop nearly lifted us out of the raft, but luckily we all managed to hang on and made it safely through the rapid, although we were soaked by the end of it.
After a few more big rapids the river got a bit calmer and we were able to relax a bit more. We stopped to jump in off a high rock by the side of the river, we were drying out a bit at that point. Then a class 2 rapid we tried body rafting, basically jumping in to the rapid and hoping for the best. I felt like I drank half the river within the first 30 seconds as you just no control over where you went and the waves were too big to avoid. After this I realised how lucky we were not to fall in in one of the big rapids.
We finished rafting at lunch time and had another good meal before driving back to Cusco. Spent the rest of the afternoon sorting everything out and getting ready for a 4am start for a trek the next day. In the evening we met with all the rafting guys in a bar in town where they showed us a DVD and photos they had taken during the trip. But unfortunatly I had a 4am start the next day for the trek to Mach Picchu, so couldn´t stay too long.
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