Last weekend we decided to get away from Quito, a city perched in the Andes mountains, and head down to the Ecuadorian Pacific Coast. We headed down to Guayaquil (the biggest city in Ecuador) to explore and see what kind of new adventure activities we can get involved with. To be quite honest, we’ve not been running trips around that area but we knew that some exiting rivers and canyons exist around the area.

A few weeks ago we covered the Whitewater Kayaking Tournament (2008) in the town of Bucay where the Rio Chimbo is located.  This river is a class III and about an hour and a half away from Guayaquil. So we decided to hop in a kayak and run the river to see if it  would be something we can share with all of you. I went down river by kayak for about one hour. The river turned out to be a solid class III with great waves and some magical jungly waterfalls along the way. This is not a super technical river but it is super fun for rafting.

We had to literally rapell the boat down to the water from a few meters high. That makes it even more fun! I mean, running a section of a river that has no viable human access makes the whole experience magical.

The river runs right through the town and the rafting experience is complimented with canyoning and mountain biking. Definitely rough adventurous terrain worth a couple of days of your time.

At the end of the section of the river that we ran we noticed something that made us really sad and frustrated. A garbage dump right into the river. Horrible.

Barefoot Expeditions already has taken action by calling the Bucay Municipality and talking to the Director of Tourism and the Waste Management Department to ask them to clean the dump. We are also in the process of filing a formal written complaint with the Municipality.  We will cover this issue in a follow up post.

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