I will admit that after 25 days of third world travel with my future in-laws, my motives for going off to paddle some difficult white water last year were complex. Yes, I've been a kayaker for a decade, and the Bhote Koshi River, which pours down the Tibetan Himalayas into Nepal — rated Class V during high water, but in winter "a classic Class III," according to one outfitter — appeared to be within my abilities.
Amrit Ale
There are rafting and kayaking trips available on the Bhote Koshi River, which pours down the Himalayas into Nepal.
But I was also a 41-year-old man who had lived alone most of my life, some of those years in wilderness. While the trek in Nepal with my fiancée and her sister and parents had been lovely, when they opted for a couple of days of sightseeing in a national park, I welcomed the idea of peeling off with one of the porters, who was also a river guide. Which is how he and I came to be standing between the river and the road at 8 a.m. one day in February, fog rising off the water, wearing wet suits and helmets and life jackets, flagging down a rickety local bus and hoisting plastic kayaks onto its roof.
A few hours earlier, we had arrived at a riverside restaurant at first light after two hours of winding roads from Katmandu in a shared taxi. We sat in the cold mist and ordered milk chai.
"Mark G, what will we eat?" Saroj asked. In Nepali, you add "gee" after someone's name as a sign of respect.
He wasn't asking for my order as much as my prediction. I said, "Chapatis and eggs?"
Saroj exchanged a volley of Nepalese with the waiter and then announced, "We will eat noodles."
Saroj and I had been hiking together for 19 days. He was from a village but had worked as a river guide for seven years and lived in Katmandu. Many Nepalese men appear to Americans as extremely polite, shy to the point of deferential, quick to smile. Saroj not so much. He wore shoulder-length hair tied in a knot, smoked cigarettes, spoke little and smiled slightly while bemusement flashed in his eyes. He spoke English in blunt declarative lines that could sound surly, all of which is to say he acted like almost every river guide I have ever known. When I had first asked him about guiding on the gentle rivers in India, his eyes lighted up. "Ah, very difficult to make Sikhs wear helmet on turban."
After our noodles we changed into river gear, and I climbed aboard the bus while Saroj rode on the roof minding the boats. We contoured along the steep flank of river canyon terraced for farm plots like a big green wedding cake. In the villages, brick structures clung to the hillside, smoke curling from stove chimneys, and schoolchildren in uniform raced to jump aboard. After half an hour, the driver stopped and ordered everyone off. Saroj lowered the kayaks and climbed down.
"Bandh," he said. It was early 2012, and the latest round of government price hikes on natural gas had sent Nepal into turmoil. Students shut down the highways in what is called a bandh — a cross between a protest rally and a sit-in. Gas lines in Katmandu wrapped around the block, and power outages crippled the city every day for six hours or more. Among the many plots to produce electricity was a proposal to dam the very river we were approaching.
"Now we walk," Saroj said.
We shouldered the heavy boats and trudged, paddles in hand, through the next village, where adults and children regarded us as spacemen. A blacksmith hammered metal in his shop. After a mile Saroj said, "We launch here," and we crossed a delta of cobble and garbage and lifted the boats over boulders to the river. The plan was to warm up on the easy section, then drive farther up the canyon to run the hard stuff in the morning.
The water was low, and the rapids were rocky but not fierce. Waterfalls poured down from the steep jungle off sheer rock walls. Unlike wild places in America, people actually live here: we paddled past stone homes jutting over the banks, and men swimming while carrying a rope across the current to haul felled trees. The rapids were choked with boulders, and Saroj and I snaked between them without so much as an Eskimo roll, which was fine with me: the water was cold and I had no dry-top with rubber gaskets on throat and wrist to keep warm and dry. Saroj lent me his own life jacket, and I ended up wearing a farmer-john wet suit, three layers of fleece and a windbreaker — warm enough as long as you didn't submerge.
Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang
Explorer: A Rinse and a Roll on a River in Nepal
Dengan url
http://travelwisatawan.blogspot.com/2013/06/explorer-rinse-and-roll-on-river-in_23.html
Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya
Explorer: A Rinse and a Roll on a River in Nepal
namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link
Explorer: A Rinse and a Roll on a River in Nepal
sebagai sumbernya
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar