Wild ride: river rafting is the high-water mark of efforts to turn Chile into a natural destination for adventure travelers.

Futaleufu means "wild river" in Mapuche, the language of Chile's indigenous people. There couldn't be a more appropriate name for its powerful, crystalline waters, which run along the northern frontier of Patagonia, more than 1,000 kilometers to the south of Chile's capital city Santiago.

The river's waters, classified as Category V or VI for white-water rafting, carve a uniquely beautiful valley through the heart of the Andes, creating a paradise for adventure tourism fanatics. The town of Futaleufu is home to 1,826 people who in the rafting season--from November to March--share their town with 5,000 tourists on an adrenaline rush in a place that doesn't even have its own gas station.

"In Patagonia there is no pollution or industry, the water and air are pure, and there are very few people. Nature dominates," says Chris Spelius, a one-time member of the U.S. Olympic kayaking team who fell in love with the valley after traversing the river for the first time in 1985. Spelius's view, an apparently common one, is that Futaleuffi is the most difficult river in the world where ordinary people can pay to ride the rapids. "It's dangerous even if you use all the appropriate security procedures," he says.

Fifteen years ago, Spelius founded Chile Expeditions, a small Internet tourism company which, like seven other tour operators established in the past decade, offers mostly U.S. and European tourists the vertiginous experience of rafting downriver, fly-fishing in nearby lakes, trekking in the Andes and more demanding sports, like sea kayaking.

Tour packages with Chile Expeditions cost from US$1,300 to $4,000 per person per week, depending on the trip and on the level of service. The company has 23 employees, 16 of them Chilean. The former Olympian won't say how much the company earned last season but does claim his business alone gave Chilean airline LAN $200,000 in fares.

The river and nearby attractions have become an ideal business for small tour operators. "Because of the characteristics of the place, the type of tourist it attracts and the difficulty of accessing the valley, we don't think this is the place for hotel chains or tourism companies that rely on the kind of infrastructure that would destroy the mountain atmosphere," says Raul Manzano, the director of Sernatur, the Chilean national tourism board, for the country's southern lakes region.

Getting there isn't easy. Foreigners must first arrive in Santiago, then go by plane or by bus to the city of Puerto Montt, 1,024 kilometers south. There begins a third leg to the valley itself, by air, water or land. The land option actually takes visitors out of Chile and through Argentina.

A $3,000 trip includes 10 days of rafting and other activities along the Futaleufu and the Figueroa rivers, whose turquoise waters run along the Argentine border. That's just one of the packages offered by Futaleufu Explore, a company founded two years ago by U.S. tour guide Josh Lowry, who has 20 years of experience kayaking, and Marcela Rivas, a Chilean ski instructor.

The official statistics are upbeat. According to Sernatur, 945,000 tourists visited the lakes region in the most recent summer season, compared to 650,000 visitors in 1999. Sernatur says tourism generates some 16,000 jobs in the region each year.

Sernatur National Director Oscar Santelices says he did a study two years ago to find out how Chile was seen by foreign tourists, and the results were not good. "We realized that Chile wasn't very well known as a tourist destination in faraway markets," he says. Nevertheless, the agency decided to take the finding as an opportunity to promote different aspects of the country Nature became the central theme, summed up by the agency's slogan, "Chile: Nature that Moves You."

"The niche we should have been carving out wasn't traditional sun-and-beach tourism but rather special interest tourism, or more specifically adventure tourism and wine tourism, among others" says Santelices. The shift in focus was right on the money Tourism generated income of $1.27 billion for Chile in 2004, up from $900 million in 2000. Sernatur calculates that the figure could hit $1.4 billion in 2005.

Threatened. Tourism companies in the area say that the Futaleufu River's days could be numbered--or at the very least its status as virgin wilderness could be affected--if multinational power company Endesa, the main power generator in Chile, moves forward with plans to build a series of hydroelectric projects in Chile's far south. One of them is expected to generate up to 1,695 megawatts and would be built on the Futaleufu. Operators claim that their business would be seriously damaged if those plans end up going forward.

Ivan Couso, coordinator of the Chilean government's energy-efficiency program, says the country must expand its energy infrastructure so that it doesn't have to depend on an unpredictable supply of natural gas from neighboring Argentina. Several alternatives are being considered, including geothermal and nuclear energy "There isn't just one option on the table, and mechanisms exist to protect the interests of important sectors of the economy, such as the tourism industry" says Couso. In addition, "each project must be reviewed by environmental impact system, which is laid out in Chile's environmental legislation."

EDUARDO CORONADO * SANTIAGO

WHITE WATER

Chilean tourism is on a natural high, thanks to
adventure travel.

'00      286
'01      788
'02      967
'03    1,108
'04    1,270
'05F   1,400

F = Forecast

SOURCE: Sernatur

Note: Table made from bar graph.