Memories of Rafting

I didn't write about this at the time, but before crossing into Argentina for the last time, Anne and I spent a couple days in Futeleufú, a very small town in a gorgeous area of mountains. Although there are many things to do as a tourist, it's relatively undeveloped, lacking even an ATM (the first one was scheduled to arrive just a week or two after we were there), which was the ultimate reason we couldn't stay longer though we would have liked to. We went on a rafting trip, which Anne wrote a bit about, and during my time on the river I was wondering what the area would look like if I visited in 15 or 20 years. It's something I've often done in the small beautiful towns in the middle of spectacular nature I've been lucky enough to visit on this trip. I'm always fascinated by those "then and now" books with pictures of a city 100 years ago compared to the same points of view today, and I try to imagine the "then" pictures as the present day small towns with dirt roads, and make up the future "now" pictures in my head.

After the rafting trip I was talking to one of the guides and found that there is a project to dam the river, with construction starting in two or three years. It was a bit shocking to learn that the river I had just been on, one of the top spots in the world for rafting, whose waters have run the same path for hundreds of thousands of years, would be destroyed in just a few short years. There will be no coming back to relive the experience and see how things have changed.