“Mekong” Mick’s Wildass Adventure–Chapter 12: IN which Mick picks his way through the “Dragon’s Teeth” and runs into his first Chinese mega–dam…
“A five day detour to the Zongdjian horse racing festival gave our bodies some time to recover and one last glimpse of the rich Tibetan cultural heritage before entering a new cultural realm of Lisu, Bai and Han farmers. As expected the Mekong rose several feet in our absence and was less than 2 meters below the high water mark when we set off from the Lincang bridge. As the water volume increased so too did the level of chaos encountered class IV – V runs were followed by class IV – V boils, whirlpools and surges. It was an awesome section of whitewater and we thoroughly enjoyed it.
For a change we actually had a fair idea of what we were in for over the next 160km due to some detailed accounts from previous expeditions posted on the informative Shangri-La river expeditions web site. There were long and detailed descriptions of one particular rapid called dragons teeth. It was located in a sheer sided canyon and was supposedly extremely difficult to portage. Previous boaters had graded it as almost off the scale and at lower water levels it had flipped most of the rafts that dared to run it. With approximately 3 times more water currently in the river we wondered whether dragons teeth would turn into a suicide run.
Late on the first day we noted a large avalanche scar on river right where the northern face of a hill had slid into the river. Peculiarly there was no debris at the base of the scar. The debris had been flushed down stream by flood waters for more than two kilometers, plugging up the entrance to a canyon. It was dragon’s teeth. From 200 meters upstream we could see the horizon line drop away significantly and mist rise up from the violence. We eddied out on river right just above the drop to inspect the rapid and to our relief it looked runnable but with the light fading fast it was best left until the next day. Camp was set in the scenic gorge and we settled in for a night under the stars.
The white water was huge over the next two days but loads of fun. Occasionally we would be lashed by gales that always seemed to blow upstream. At one point we were forced to stop above a long rapid because the winds whipped up so much mist off the surface of the waves and holes that we could no longer visually make out the features to avoid. Suddenly the river stopped dead.
We had arrived at the controversial Manwan Dam. The Chinese are in the process of planning and constructing a cascade of 9 dams across the Mekong mainstream in Yunnan, two of which have been completed and another 4 are currently under construction. The dams on the Mekong combined constitute one of the largest engineering feats ever undertaken. To give an impression of the scale, the Xiowan dam due to be completed in 5 years is about the same size as the Hoover dam in the United States and will back up the water for 170km through the gorges, forests and villages we had just paddled.
The pros and cons of large scale hydropower dams can be debated indefinitely with advocates citing a long list of benefits while opponents cite an arguably longer list of negative environmental and social impacts. In most cases where inequities are obvious and clearly defined dam advocates will attempt to mitigate the situation by offering benefits to the peoples and environments most at risk. Although mitigation attempts associated with the highly publicized 3 dams project on the Yangtze were widely considered by the international community to be inadequate the Chinese authorities did in fact devote hundreds of millions of dollars to relocating the most affected people to purpose built cities.”
Tomorrow: Mick gets bummed out…
Yunnan Landscape: “Hmm, I wonder where I can get some takeout…”
(Photo: Courtesy Lynley O’Shea)
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