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Mainstream travel companies and tourist hotels like to brag about their clockwork effi- ciency. -No surprises!" the ads trumpet. Such companies, of course, completely miss the point of travel: to be surprised. The real traveler seeks out the unpredictability that Disney World and Club Med try so hard to eliminate. British explorer Wilfrid Thesiger,C:O:==::::::::::~~~~ one of the world's great travelers, put it nicely: -I long for the chaos, the smells. the _ .... __ untidiness ... of the life." The prerequ isite for a haphazard life, or journey, is ignorance. Better yet, misinformation. Sadly, many so-called "adventure" travel compa- nies are now so well informed and smoothly efficient that even trips to the most remote parts of Antarctica or Borneo or Pakistan routinely go off without a hitch. They fax you the trip itinerary that says on the morning of January 14th, you will make a Zodiac excursion to Cuverville Island, where you will stroll among several thousand nesting penguins. Come January 14th, sure enough, there you are on Cuverville Island, knocking penguin guano off your boots. So the smells are there, but where's the chaos? For Thesiger disciples, who long for the haphazard, there is an alter- native to such well-oiled adventures: the exploratory trip. When a new area of the world is opened up to foreigners, or an outfitter simply decides to venture into a new place, somebody has to go first. By definition, that first explorato- ry group will be blessed with ignorance and misinformation. "We usually don't advertise our exploratory trips," says Jim Sano of Geographic Expeditions, a San Francisco-based adventure outfitter. "They're by invitation only, to clients we know. Otherwise, you risk getting people who have unrealistic expectations. You have to be prepared for anything." Prepared for, say, a drunken Chinese bandit on the hood of your jeep, trying to punch his way through the windshield at 30 miles per hour on the road to Mt Kailas in Tibet. (The driver eventually dislodged him with a series of rapid s-turns.) Or, say, a closed border crossing that would require a 10-day detour back to Katmandu over some of the worst roads in the world. (The trip leader, carrying $3,000 as a bribery reserve, solved the border problem with admirable econ- omy by simply getting the guards drunk.) My own definition of adventure travel requires that at some point during the trip I say to myself, "What the hell am I doing here?" This require- ment was exquisitely fulfilled on a recent exploratory river trip down the Rio Palena, in Chilean Patagonia. The outfitter, Earth River Expeditions, has for several years run whitewater rafting trips down the nearby Rio Futaleufu. The trips are usually marvels of planning and logistics, with hot tubs, wine, masseuses-and not a hint of the haphazard. The Rio Palena trip, by contrast, was chaos from beginning to end, a monument to ignorance and misinforma- tion, and therefore a true exploratory trip. First, there was a slight last-minute change in the itinerary: a dif- ferent river. The trip had been promoted as an exploratory descent of the Rio Minchimavida, a remote whitewater river north of the Futaleufu that Earth River guides had never seen, much less run. But, hey, it looked good on the to po map. After most of the clients had been booked and printed itineraries sent out, a belated aerial survey of the river determined that it was unrunnable due to vicious rapids, waterfalls and steep-sided canyons. Most paddlers received last-minute phone calls to this effect, but several trip members arrived in Chile expecting to run the Minchimavida. Fortunately, Earth River had been wise (or lucky) in choosing its clients, and there was little grumbling about the switcheroo. "I just wanted to go on a river, " says Ethyl Klein, a sedentary New York political pollster who had never paddled a watercraft of any kind, had never slept outdoors and couldn't swim. An unlikely adventur- er, she nonetheless had what it takes for an exploratory trip: the surprise- me attitude of a real traveler. The first two days of the Palena trip- a horseback ride to the river-went smoothly. But more surprises lurked. Because the Palena is a flatwater river, the organizers had decided that, instead of rafts, they would use a new kind of watercraft: a pair of two-man Hawaiian racing canoes lashed together side by side to form what they christened a catarigger. There had been no time to actually test the new craft, so in retrospect we should not have been surprised when three of them began to leak almost immediately. Soon the catariggers became waterlogged slugs. We then discovered a slight design oversight: the sealant around the rudder bolt holes dissolved when exposed to water. We spent half a day jerry-rigging the boats with duct tape. The rest of the trip was a succession of logistical foul-ups that included a missed rendezvous with a supply boat, a local guide who never showed up, inadequate maps and/or map-readers that left us unsure of our position most of the time, an unplanned six-hour bush- whack through dense prickly scrub forest and, the grand finale, a close brush with mass hypothermia. I set a personal record for what-the-hell- am-I-doing-here moments on a single trip: five. Still, had everything gone according to plan , we would not have eaten a fabulous salmon dinner at a fishing lodge in La Junta, or ridden our horses belly-deep in sparkling aquamarine water for half a mile along a submerged sandbar, or camped in a spooky abandoned house with a statue of Jesus out front and a sign over the door that read: esta puerta se abre para Cristo (this door opens for Christ). Next year, Earth River will run another Palena trip , presum- ably with boats that don't leak and a guide who actually shows up and knows the way. Clients on the trip probably won't suffer hypothermia. But on the other hand, they will not have the following exchange with a Chilean rancher whom we encountered during the horseback ride to the river. "Say, how often do you get outsiders in this valley7" we asked the rancher. "You're the first," he replied.