The third extract from my battered expedition diary – it was our first push to the far northwest and we had just scouted the Selegua, but a lack of eddies and access points combined with rising river levels forced us to walk away. Switching to the back-up plan we drove to the Valparaiso, our first first descent of the expedition:
“To provide some background, the Foreign Office specifically warns against travelling to the region we currently found ourselves in, mainly due to ‘increased and sustained gang violence along the Mexico-Guatemala border’. We did avoid the border rivers, but first descents such as the Selegua and Valparaiso (a few kilometres further away) were too tempting to miss and Greg – our guide – seemed confident that the cartel were too busy fighting themselves to notice us.
We expected the Valparaiso to be grade 3/4 but had our eyes peeled for a long slide spotted on the drive up. After inspecting a few drops from the road bridge we made our way down to the river. It was at this point that Osian spotted a human coccyx next to the bridge stanchion. We could only hypothesise, but given that we’d been followed by cartel members on motorbikes (who were open-carrying and currently watching from the bridge… for obvious reasons we have no photos of them) we didn’t stick around.
After a few clean drops and a bit of boulder-bashing we arrived at the slide, now comfortingly far away from the get-on. The slide – which we named Birth Canal – was about 25m long, very similar to Gunbarrel on the Moriston but with an unpleasantly retentive hole at the bottom and siphon on the right. I went second and got a mostly clean line, except being taileed at the bottom where I lost a few style points!
A mixture of grade 3/4 slides, drops and chutes were to follow all the way down to the get-out, where Jaimé (one of our drivers) was waiting with the pickup and some tuna mayo sandwiches. We chatted to some of the locals and a couple of kids sat in the ReactR’s and tried on our kit.
Driving back to Jacultenango it turned out that Jaimé had been stopped by the cartel whilst running the shuttle. They’d essentially wanted to know what we were doing, and with some videos as evidence he’d managed to persuade them that we were only here to kayak. Apparently mollified, we were told to avoid certain towns with ongoing conflict, but also that we would not be bothered for the rest of our time in the northwest. This was indeed the case, and despite being watched by more guys on motorbikes the rest of our off-water activities passed uneventfully…”
I hope you enjoyed this article, if you’d like to keep track of our film tour then check out the BUKE 2024 Facebook page and website linked below!
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Patrick Kyak 