Mekong Meander: Okay, I screwed up. I’m traveling and I don’t have “Mekong” Mick’s dispatch with me, so I can’t post Chapter 5 today. Oops. It’ll go up tomorrow afternoon. But I do have links to the reports that Pete Winn of Shangri-La River Expeditions wrote, after he paddled big chunks of the Mekong (Mick acknowledged this pioneering effort in Chapter 1). Here’s an excerpt from Winn’s encounter with Mekong Madness:

By now no one was worried about not enough whitewater, even Ralf. I was even beginning to worry about too much whitewater. Mike had been pressing for a layover day, but was beginning to agree with me that we should wait until we were closer to the takeout, in case we had to line or portage a big rapid, which can very time consuming. We were in a black (hard) rock gorge, with lots of rapids. Sure enough, right below the beach we stopped at for lunch after Horse and Pig rapid, there was an 11 on a 10 scale. If you ate lunch before scouting it, you’d loose your lunch, and if you scouted it first, you’d loose your appetite. It was a Catch 22 lunch stop that turned into a campsite. It was too late to portage or line, and it sure looked like that was the best option.

The next morning we ferried over to the other side and asked a local farmer and his family to help us portage. The rapid wasn’t that long, just really steep. We carried all of the dry bags to a huge eddy at the end of the rapid, plus Steve’s, Tuckey’s and my kayaks. Steve has a girlfriend, and Tuckey and I have families, good excuses for portaging. Ralf, who’s in between girlfriends, decided to go for it. The rapid had a 12′ keeper hole with a forever eddy at the lower left, so I paddled over and walked up to the hole with a throw rope so I could (hopefully) pull Ralf out if he went into it. He had a good run, must have meditated (not with Mike, however, see below), or maybe his next girlfriend will be named Serendipity. We lined David’s raft halfway down, to where the run was only a class 10, and he had a good run from there, after a long, long, long wait in the eddy (he said he got stuck on a rock in the eddy, and since I portaged I’ll believe him).

Then, with a raft and two kayaks for support, Mike and Mark decided to run the far right in the second cataraft, where, if they were lucky, they’d catch the eddy where David started from and probably be OK. I gave them kayak helmets just in case they needed them. The sight from below was impressive – Mike missed the eddy, caught a huge lateral (10′ high by 75′ long, at least) that surfed him out to the middle of the rapid, where he flipped. Not just a flip, though – the river threw his boat completely out of the water, up into the air. Mike and Mark had no choice but to grab a big breath and jump into the river, so they didn’t get carried to far left. So much for the meditation technique. Fortunately, they didn’t get carried into the keeper hole, and both managed to swim into the big eddy on the right. Also, very fortunately, one of the last big holes, right next to the keeper hole, flipped the raft right side up. Mike had tied the oars to the boat, so they were both there when I paddled over and climbed aboard. It was the easiest flipped raft I’ve ever had to catch. Maybe Mike meditated for me. Too bad he didn’t hang on after the first flip, he would really have a story to tell. The locals hadn’t named the rapid, so Mike named it No Entrance, No Exit.

Shangri-La has a great website, with tons of good reading about big water in Asia. Click here for a history of the search for the Mekong headwaters, and here for a series of expedition journals that criss-cross China and Tibet. Nice life…



Mekong Headwaters: “Hmmm, it doesn’t look like much. Should be easy to paddle…”

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