•	Features
•	Hotline

< November December 2003
	Features
Big Water on the Brahmaputra Frederick Reimers

It was a view that would have pleased most anybody—the sinuous turquoise river set, as though by a jeweler, in the bottom of an enormous, forested canyon. One of the Himalayas’ uncounted snowy peaks rose in the distance. The only signs of man were the thatched-roof huts sprinkled among rock-walled rice terraces at the far bend. The vista belonged on a poster in a travel agent’s office, but to us, it was profoundly disappointing. Looking down into the canyon from the road high above, we were once again dismayed that there were no rapids to be seen.

Muttering, we climbed back into the jeep and slammed the doors. Vaibhav Kala, the 30-year-old owner of New Delhi, India-based Aquaterra Adventures, motioned the driver to continue on and then turned to us in the back seat. "Do you think it will be like this the whole way?" he asked, his normally affable expression replaced by one of consternation. "Completely flat?" It was a strange question, considering he was the only one of us who’d been down the river before.

But no one had paddled the upper Brahmaputra River since the flood. Hundreds of miles upstream the Yigong Tsangpo—a tributary of the Brahmaputra—had been blocked for two years by a landslide, forming a lake several miles long. On June 11, 2000, the dam suddenly gave way. A wall of water sluiced down the Yigong, through the Po Tsangpo gorge and then out onto the Yarlung Tsangpo (as the Brahmaputra is known in Tibet). By the time it reached the Indian border and the stretch of river in the canyon below us, the torrent had formed into a 150-foot-high, debris-filled surge bulldozing trees, vegetation and bridges from the canyon as it went. But what had it done to the rapids?

Vaibhav had reason to worry. He was leading a group of 21 customers on an eight-day, 110-mile trip down the river, which, when he first ran it in 1994, rivaled even the Grand Canyon in enormous, raftable whitewater. But now, in November, 2002, as we drove toward our put-in at Tuting, the river appeared markedly calmer than his nerves.

"Well, it’s possible that the rapids are lurking around the corners, out of sight," said Skinny Jones, a veteran expedition paddler from Wales. "Or maybe the flood just blasted them all out of the canyon," said Lara. Skinny, a self-described "great gangly thing," and his girlfriend Lara Tipper, a former British Olympic slalom team member, are easily the world’s tallest paddling couple. All knees and elbows, they were crammed into the backseat beside me at odd angles.

While the wholesale scouring of dozens of rapids was unlikely, no one really knew what such a flood would do. It was an event virtually without precedent, and enduring a jarring, two-day-long drive to the put-in, we worked ourselves into an adrenaline junkie’s paranoid frenzy. We’d spent thousands of dollars and journeyed seven days on planes, a river ferry and sputtering jeeps to run a river we could safely float on inflatable alligators.

We needn’t have worried. On our first day, scouting the first major rapid, my thought was, "I don’t see how any of the rafts are going to make it through this thing." Ningguing was oceanic. Twice the size of Lava Falls, it is a quarter-mile-long plunge through 20-foot breaking waves. Where the laterals crossed, the collision threw plumes 20 feet into the air. On the edges, the current sheared against the walls and eddies and great cauliflower boils bloomed hideously. Across the river, we saw the men, women and darting children of the town of Ningguing spread among the house-sized boulders on shore. They’d heard about us, and were curious to see what would happen.

I found myself launching my kayak onto a 200-yard-long ramp of smooth, humping green water. The secret to running big water is grasping its scale—we estimated the Brahmaputra’s flow to be 50,000 cfs, and that at the low flows of autumn. Everything is larger, from the hydraulics to the waves to the beatings you take if you screw up. And so are the spaces between the waves. Because of that, the run seems to unfold in slow motion.

Fighting the urge to race recklessly into the rapid like a berserker, I patiently executed the plan. I angled left on the first 20-footer, the climb up its face reminiscent of paddling out through a shore break on the ocean. At the top, the wobbling surface crumbled beneath me and I was momentarily airborne. I passed left of the ominous rooster tail and then had to stop paddling, lest I drive too hard and into the boiling eddylines alongside the main flow. That wait yielded a beating from the next breaking wave, but when I’d shaken the river from my eyes, I was in the tail waves and I only had to ride out the strange currents and whirlpools, an exercise in balance and edge control like riding a unicycle through an earthquake.

Things didn’t go as well for the rafts. But where I’d expected all four to flip, two, as well as the single-manned cataraft, made it through upright. The two upset rafts surged downstream, their black undersides high-backed like scarabs on the swirling aquamarine river. Kayakers scurried about the foam-marbled surface, hauling the sputtering rafters from the water. The crowd on shore couldn’t decide whether to cheer or shake their heads.

Two rapids later, Palsi rapid exacted a similar toll. Despite only having run four Class III-IV rapids, our tally was four flipped rafts, a mangled hand and a dislocated shoulder. By the time we landed at camp, we’d had all the whitewater we wanted for the day.

When I stepped out of my tent the next morning, the alpenglow was just fading from the forested foothills. Our tents formed a perfectly straight line on the beach, having been laid out with military precision by the support crew. This battalion shadowed us by road and included cooks and porters for a riverside kitchen complete with wicker chicken coop, whose fretting population dwindled with each curry dinner. The crew was led by an ex-Indian Army general whose secondary role was to pave the way for us politically. Our expedition had not only the rapids to negotiate, but also the treacherous bureaucracy of Arunachal, India’s least-visited state. That the Brahmaputra has been run so seldom (we were the sixth party) is less a function of its difficulty than its accessibility.

The Brahmaputra/Tsangpo has long been one of the world’s most intriguing rivers. Traversing 1,000 miles of the Tibetan plateau, with an average elevation of 10,000 feet, it has the distinction of being the world’s highest river. Its headwaters begin at Mt. Kailash, a sacred site for both Buddhists and Hindus, and its delta, 2,000 miles later, is Bangladesh, two-thirds of whose acreage is flooded every year by the joined waters of the Brahmaputra and Ganges. In between, near the Indian border, the river takes a hearty right-hand turn and disappears into a frightful gorge.

The Great Bend, as the region is known, has defied exploration for centuries. Not only is the terrain hostile, but so are the locals. Until the 20th century the only Westerners to visit the Tibetan side did so in disguise for fear of being ejected or killed. Similarly, Adi tribesmen of the tropical forests on the south side of the Himalayas, the site of our expedition, were fiercely defensive. The British were only able to explore the region after subduing the Adi militarily—in response to the killing of two English explorers.

Because of those challenges, and the tortured mountain terrain, it was not even known to Westerners that the Tsangpo and Brahmaputra were the same river until the 20th century. The most famous attempt to ascertain that fact involved an English-trained Indian spy, disguised as a Buddhist pilgrim, who in 1883 planned to toss painted logs into the river above the gorge to be spotted downstream in India. His plan was thwarted when he was sold into slavery by his covert contact. And by the time he escaped two years later and finally launched his log flotilla, it was too late; no one was watching for them.

The stretch into which those logs floated, 100 miles upstream of our put-in, contains some of the world’s most horrible whitewater. In the 1990s, two separate kayaking parties suffered drowned team members trying to run the sheer-walled gorges. Finally, in February 2002, in what has been described as the world’s last great kayaking problem, a group led by American Scott Lindgren slinked their way down most of the canyon in the dead of winter when the river was at its lowest. The expedition members all described it as the most difficult thing they’d ever done.

While still formidable, the rapids mellow considerably by the time they reach India. The political situation, however, does not. Thanks to the Chinese army overrunning much of Arunachal in 1962, India’s farthest-flung state has been on high military alert ever since. (If you look at a Chinese-made map, Arunachal is shown, along with Tibet, within the Chinese border.) Very few tourists, Indian or foreign, have been allowed in, and every expedition down the Brahmaputra has had a connection to the military. Even now, the best way to run the river is through an Indian outfitter like Aquaterra Adventures, which is well equipped to shoot the rivers of red tape.

The reward for those negotiations is an almost surreal amount of pomp and circumstance. On our two-day drive to the river we were feted each night with troupes of dancing women. Guided into an Adi village for a "cultural encounter," we toured the thatched-roof huts, met villagers and watched them pound rice chaff with their bare feet. In all the excitement, one old woman estimated that Viki, a pretty young Englishwoman in our group, would be worth a bridal price of 200 pigs and 200 mathoun—a cross between a cow and a buffalo. But even by the standards of ceremony-loving India, our send-off at the put-in was astonishing.

A crowd of 400 greeted us on the beach, including villagers, musicians, lines of dancing women, chanting Buddhist monks and the chief minister of Arunachal, who had helicoptered in for the ceremony. A loudspeaker, run from a car battery, was tied to a bamboo stake and planted into the sand. The chief minister gave a speech befitting the occasion, in both English and Hindi, and then shook each of our hands in a receiving line. Next came women hanging garlands of flowers around our lifejackets and then a necklace of threaded ginger root. Last came a shriveled man who tied a string around our wrists—the classic token of a journey, physical or spiritual, in Indian culture—and offered a benediction. Completely bedecked, we stood on the beach in the bright morning sun, blinking at the expectant throng.

Later, at the head of Ningguing rapid, I’d puzzled over what to do with the fragile flower garland that I’d paddled the first easy miles wearing. At last, while the rafters hemmed and hawed over their routes, I’d set it in the current and watched it drift down the long green ramp into the exploding waves.

But now the niceties of the paegent were far behind us, and the drama was real. Many of the less experienced rafting clients had been so unnerved by two consecutive thrashings at Ningguing and Palsi that there’d been a mutinous meeting the night before. On the second day we’d been scheduled to pass through the Marmong Gorge, the canyon’s narrowest point, where scouting or portaging might be impossible. Many were concerned that since no one had seen the results of the flood, we might be heading into an inescapable situation. So it was agreed that three kayakers would paddle the section first to report on what was in the gorge. They would be met at the first road access that night and shuttled back up to camp.

Skinny, Jed Weingarten and I launched into the gorge confident that if we met an unrunnable, unportageable rapid we could scale the wall somewhere and rope our kayaks up after us. But as on any exploratory, there was nervousness, and rather than charge headlong downstream, we let the muscular current draw us into the gorge with a certain reticence. At the first big drop—white plumes of spray arcing over the horizon line—we climbed cracks in the wall to get a view. It turned out to be a classic Brahmaputra rapid—a football-field-sized green ramp into the chaos of colliding laterals at the bottom. The boiling eddylines along the walls could kill you, but if you launched into the middle, you’d be fine. "It’s Class III, but you’ve got to take your lumps at the bottom," said Skinny. And we did, savoring the prickly suspense of being drawn down the rapid’s tongue to the gnashing whitewater below.

At last we encountered the flood’s handiwork. Late in the day we approached yet another horizon line and landed among the boulders to take a look. The sight made us feel like the cooped chickens. The Brahmaputra made a right-hand turn, its entire force piling headlong into the black wall like a train wreck. Whitewater lurched 40 feet up the rock in a massive, seething pile. I calculated what would happen to a kayak were it to sail into that mess. If you weren’t ripped right out by the sheer violence of it, both paddler and boat could be buried deep in the seam for minutes. If you were expelled before you drowned, it’d better be to river right—a 50-50 proposition, because the left side fed right back into the maw. We shivered.

"This must be a new rapid," said Skinny. "Vaibhav didn’t describe anything like this." Where before there had been nothing but a placid bend, the flood had redirected the river down a ramp of boulders and into the wall. The rafts would have to portage. Though in the maneuverable kayaks we snuck down the right shore and feverishly climbed the welling eddy over the currents feeding back into the pillow, it was a paranoid dash.

The Tooth Fairy, as we named the drop for the prospect of teeth and bones buried beneath the enormous pillow, was the worst we found. The following day we led the rest of the expedition to the portage and we camped just above it, sleeping fitfully as she haunted our dreams. A few Class III drops remained in the gorge, but by and large the river flowed placidly between sheer walls, waterfalls cascading into the river from streams ending abruptly above. We floated the flats with our helmets off, murmuring to one another in the cathedral stillness and marveling at the scour line the flood had left 200 feet above our heads.

Below the Marmong Gorge the flood generally rendered the rapids milder. Several drops, including the previously fearsome Karko Killer (named after a nearby village), had been smoothed out and were now merely big Class III romps. As proof of the flood’s might, we camped one night just downstream of the twisted remains of a bridge. Though it had once spanned the river 100 feet above, its broad steel beams and rusted cables snapped like guitar strings, now hung from the cliffs, their ends half buried in the beach.

We spent leisurely days on the river, by then in tune with the rhythm of the big, crunching waves and the patient timing needed to slice between them. On the long stretches of calm water we lounged on the rafts and admired the unspoiled forest heaping up the canyon walls (the Indian government has forbidden logging in Arunachal). Strangely, there were very few animals or even songbirds—the locals had apparently eaten them all. Even the rice-terraced villages along the canyon seemed in place, and we spent hours acknowledging the people who invariably ran down to the shore, calling and waving wildly when they spotted our flotilla.

Each afternoon we were met at camp by the support crew, who’d laid out our tents and were hard at work about the kitchen tarp, turning out chipatis, curried potatoes and dahl. We walked the beach barefoot and drank afternoon tea and later, around the campfire, rum from the same tin mugs.

On the final morning, all that remained was to float the final 12 miles to our takeout at the town of Pasighat. One final flipped raft later and we passed from the canyon onto the plains of Assam, across which the Brahmaputra flows 700 sinuous miles to the Bay of Bengal. At the takeout—a ferry landing just outside of town—we were once again met by a throng. They pressed flower garlands around our necks and reached out to touch our kayaks, paddles and even our blond hair.

There was, of course, a ceremony, complete with lines of even more dancing women and interminable speeches in two languages. Each expedition member was called out, brought to the front of the grandstand and awarded a woven vest of the local style. Never has so much acclaim been given for so little accomplishment. Sitting in the grandstand, we chuckled that we were being so thoroughly congratulated merely for taking a vacation.

Yet the ceremony seemed for their benefit more than ours. There is a sincere hope in Arunachal that tourism will finally be permitted and that outsiders will arrive and affirm the pride that the inhabitants have for their stunning and unspoiled homeland. But as I sat looking out from under the shaded awning at the swaying, chanting dancers, I thought of the world’s crown jewels—from Pacific island paradises to Italian walled citadels—that had become jaded and tarnished by tourism. I thought of begging, homeless children, embittered waiters and sullen hotel chambermaids. I hoped that now in the 21st century, these people could apply the lessons from centuries of commercial tourism, but like exploring the river they’re pinning their hopes on, none of us knows what lurks around the corner.