Kelly and Quang's Global Roam

This morning, over a breakfast of "kuchen", a German pastry, we said good-bye to John/Hans for the last time. He´s on his way back to Argentina; we are staying in Chile. We are staying in Puerto Varas because we have all sorts of adventures planned. Today we went white water rafting on the Rio Petrohue.

Neither Quang or I had ever been white water rafting before. We signed up for the trip at the advice of a fellow hostel-mate and by 11 a.m. this morning we were standing at the edge of a river in full wet suits, life jackets and helmets getting instructions on what to do if we fell out of the raft. We looked at each other. Quang smiled. I cringed. We climbed aboard.

We didn´t fall out, but we did get wet. The first rapid we hit, our guide said, was called "Good-bye to Dry". It certainly was. A series of waves washed into the raft and over our heads. The man next to me let out a "Yeeeeee-Haaaaaa!"

Quang was positioned in the front of the raft, I was seated in the middle. Another man on the trip told me the middle was the safest place in the raft. Good, I thought, then looked at Quang perched on the front. Should I be worried? He wasn´t. Waves were pushing right up into his face and he was laughing. Another wave hit, Quang whooped, and my anxiety slipped into the river. It was fun.

And the views around us were stunning. The raft would run a rapid then hit a calm spot. It would twirl a circle in the water and soon we´d be facing the direction we´d come. The sun shone. The sky was blue. The river was turquoise. The shores were draped in dense green leaves. Volcan Osorno rose above it all - symmetrical, snow-covered and grand.

We rafted through several rapids, including "Foreplay", "Sex", "Swiss Cheese" and "The Devil´s Throat". Then the guide announced it was time for a swim. We dropped our paddles in the raft. Grabbed the outside rope and flipped ourselves into the river. Even though we were already wet from the waves, the water was still icy and it gushed into our wet suits and chilled every nook and crany of our bodies. We floated for a while, hanging on to the raft, laughing and trying to burn the image of the place we were in to our brains. There were no cameras. Only memories. And they were ones we wanted to remember.