We just got back from the Rey del Río in México, an event organized by Altius and River Roots founded by the Mexican Government and the Board of tourism of México.
I was stoked to meet team mates Sam Sutton and Egor who had also flown in for the event. With another 25 of the best kayakers in the world, good organization, huge prize money and waterfalls it was going to be an awesome weekend!
We flew in to Villahermosa (Tabasco) and drove to Palenque (Chiapas) where there are awesome Maya ruins. From there we drove to the río Tulijá commonly known as the Agua Azul due to the turquoise blue color of its water because of the minerals it contains.
We did a few training runs on Friday and a time trial to seed everyone for the boaterX. Saturday started early with the first rounds of the boaterX. The course was really narrow with only one deep line so it was really hard to pass anyone, the time trial played a huge role on the boaterX as choosing your starting position meant a lot. In the end I didn’t make the final (top 4) but I did manage to win the losers heat and ended up 5th. Not a good result but that’s all I could do with the seeding I had (6th). Congrats to Pat, Dane and Egor and Isaac for going fast and taking the top spots.
Here’s a sick video by RiverRoots from the BoaterX event on Saturday:
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On Sunday we all headed downstream to a set of three waterfalls, a 30ft, 50ft and 40ft. Every paddler had one run and he was judge on his technique, style, progression… There were sick lines, tricks off the waterfalls and all sorts of cool stuff.
Personally I didn’t have a good run and even broke my paddle on the second drop… Anyways it was a fun day. In the end I ended 7th 1 point from Sam. Pat Keller took the win followed by Rush and my bro Aniol.
Overall it was a great event, well organized and the media that Jared, Matt and Polly took is amazing so looking forward to see all the great footage they shot. This is a great step for kayaking to attract some main stream media and portrait our sport in great way.
After the event my bro, Benny and I drove north east for 8h or so to Tlapacoyan, Veracruz. We stayed at Aventured and had a great time going paddling every day. Big Bananas, Jalacingo, Tomata… There’s a lot of quality white water and a lot of fruit too so it’s a great place to hang out and spend some time.
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After a week it was time for me to head back to the city and fly back to Chile where there are a lot of river waiting, so stoked I made it out to México, learned a lot and hope to do a lot better next year! Now it’s time to paddle some rivers, head south and eat empanadas.