Safe at home
Sorry for the blackout--didn't see a computer for a while there...Anyways, I landed back in CO today and we didn't even have any more paddle mishaps!
After that last post, it was my turn for the nasty Asian stomach bug. Travis too. We took the next day off to film, whilst Tony and Dan ran a nice IV section with a few Vs on the Maoniu He. Afterwards stayed at an awesome Tibetan guest house on the side of a gorge. A Chinese group (not staying there, but just for dinner) had hired a group of traditional dancing girls, so we got a show with the stay. After the show, Dan decided to teach one of the girls to swing dance and when he starts spinning her around, she goes flying across the concrete porch and would have smashed into a rock wall if Tony hadn't been standing there to stop her. She was a little shook up-- I guess they're not used to spinning around. Travis translated what she was saying as "it made her sick--like being in a car", which is apparently a novel experience?!? Did I mention that Danbar is an awesome river town? I may have understated it--it's at the confluence of FOUR major rivers, not two!
The next day we headed into new ground that Travis had not yet explored for a few days--up the Dajing Chuan. And we got skunked! Well, not really. More like victims of our own success thus far. We drove past a really nice looking 10K section of big water class IV, thinking that the tributary we'd go along on the way to Maerkang would have something sweet that would be better suited to our creekboats (which are NOT the ideal craft for 10,000 cfs, IMHO!), since we'd seen nothing but quality so far. But the tributary ended up being softer rock and lower gradient without much for drops, and it was too far to go back, so we went and explored some Tibetan towers instead.
Drove over the last 13,000 ft pass the next day with a gorgeous pine/aspen forest on the way up. The leaves were just starting to change. We dropped into Heishui, examining the creek on the way down. Steep, low water mank up high and III-IV lower down. According to Chung Hao, only two groups of Westerners had been in this valley before us--groups of Korean and Swiss climbers. I don't know if that's 100% true, but the reaction when we rolled through town couldn't have been much different if we'd landed on a UFO! We drew attention almost everywhere we went, but this was freaky! After the whole restaurant staff sang a song for the first Westerners to ever have lunch in their establishment, we went up to run the III-IV into town, putting the Chun and Feng in the ducky just before town. They had a much needed swim along the way! :wink:
Driving downstream the following day, we were looking at an ever increasing volume of silty water, and opted for a clear tributary of III-IV called the Chibusu. Yet another dump truck shuttle. This thing may have gotten better if we had kept going up the road (or not), but we wanted to get all the way to Wolong that night (which still almost didn't happen, due to some absurd limitations on bus driver distances that our driver thankfully chose to ignore after being warned at one checkpoint--200km for a single driver in a day?!?) :x
Wolong is near the world's largest Panda reserve, and that's where we spent our last two days. Cute little buggers--we heard some guy got mauled a week earlier getting his picture taken with one, and nearly had his leg amputated! So when we took pictures, we stood behind him and the keeper made sure he had sweet bamboo in BOTH paws! Of course, these are in captivity. I guess people can wander the open preserve for months trying to see one in the wild, they're so elusive. We put in just below the panda park and ran to the confluence of something else at 1000-1200. Time to put the boating shoe back on! Fast class IV interspersed with V's--some really big! I'd compare the two that were walked by all to Supermax and Meatgrinder. Travis ran pretty much everything else, and there were various walks by the the rest of the crew.
After the run, Travis and I went and looked downstream at a steeper section that had a low volume (due to a dam) spilling between car to house sized boulders for a quick, early morning run, as I had a plane to catch out of Chengdu in the evening and the drive time is highly variable. Tony and Dan opted out, as they had had enough boating. It looked like a good, safe section to get out of quickly. Then it rained all night and tripled the flow! :shock: Early morning adventure boating in the rain! It still worked out though, since all the drops had slower sections between them, which was nice, since they all seemed to end in big holes! A swim out of one (yours truly) and a couple ports were involved, but we got on the road and got back to town in time!
Some notes on boating in China for the curious:
--We did a whole bunch of 1st and 2nd descents of awsome roadside rivers and creeks, and I'm sure just scratched the surface of what's available, let alone "off-piste". There's an astounding combination of gradient and water! Still, damns are going in all over the place and some areas--especially lower down--are horribly polluted. The rape and pillage of the environment that's going on is really incredible. I don't mean to gloss that over, but there's still a lot of great stuff that hasn't been ruined.
--If you go, bring your boating shoes! It's big and continuous like we don't get in CO. Not in recent memory, at least. And deceptively so from the road. You might just get deceptively worked! :shock:
--The language and logistical obstacles to just showing up with a boat and doing this area are HUGE. As near as I can tell, Travis and his buddies in Chengdu are the only game in town for support. I don't know when he's looking to get out again, but I suspect he'd make time when he can gather a crew if the water's right. Contact him the trip website:
http://www.shangri-la-river-expeditions.com/info/gonggashan2004.html