Unlike Lhasa and various other prefectures of the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) the Kham remains heavily restricted to foreigners. This closed area status was earned largely due to the fierce resistance communist forces faced from the local inhabitants, which lasted long into the 1960’s with American support.

External support of anti communist militants in the Kham has left a legacy of considerable distrust towards foreigners among members of the “Party” who now rule over this still wild region. Gaining permission to travel for weeks, without being constantly tailed by a government “watcher’ was in itself a considerable task, yet this was not the main problem.

Over hundreds of millions of years the Mekong River has carved out one of the most extreme and desolate environments to be found on earth within the Kham in the form of the Mekong Gorges. In its infancy the river meanders gracefully through the high plains and mountain fringed valleys of Qinghai Province, picking up volume with little turbulence before reaching its adolescence just north of the Kham Capital of Chamdo. The increasingly powerful river runs off the rails at this point undertaking a violent descent off the Tibetan plateau that continues for many hundreds of kilometers. Some of the world’s deepest and least accessible gorges have been carved out of the Himalaya by the relentless action of the water and even the rugged and resourceful Tibetans who eek an existence from the most testing of environments have not managed to inhabit long sections of the river housed in ravines up to 1600 meters deep.

As far as my research could reveal, only two river expeditions have ever been attempted along the Kham section of the Mekong. The first, a Japanese team in 1998, was violently attacked and robbed by bandits only hours after crossing the border into the TAR. Nevertheless they succeeded in navigating the relatively mild section of river from Qinghai to Chamdo.

The second took place only weeks before my own attempt and planned a full navigation from Chamdo to the Yunnan border. This attempt led by Pete Winn of Shangrila River Expeditions was made up of an experienced international team most of whom had previous exploratory experience on remote sections of the Mekong. Starting at Chamdo they rafted and kayaked just 80 miles of the planned 400 mile stretch before calling the expedition off. Slow progress down increasingly treacherous sections of rapids compounded by extreme weather conditions and heavily laden rafts led to them making a tough decision. Knowing that they were about to enter an extremely remote and much steeper section where trekking out would be almost impossible and in the knowledge that with their current rate of progress the team would quite possibly run out of food supplies before exiting the gorges, they wisely chose to trek out. A decision I would find out later quite probably saved lives. Even from a relatively accessible section of the gorges where farmer’s homesteads, trails and packhorses were accessible the trek out to a road took a week to complete.

This left the most challenging and remote section of the entire Mekong River unchallenged and I was thoroughly looking forward to having a go at it. Finally, delays caused by permit problems and sponsors not coming forth with pledged funds had placed my departure at the changing of the seasons and the start of the summer rains. This was far from ideal; if the river were to go into flood while I was in the gorges I would be left with no way out. This factor gave my departure an extreme sense of urgency and my strategy was simple, get through the gorges as fast as humanly possible before the heavy rains hit and turned the canyons into a kayaker’s hell.