KRISTEN MCDONALD
Pausing on the road to the river
Tibetan Rapids
The place where the rafters planned to put
in on the river is a hard three days drive from
Lhasa on narrow muddy roads over 16,000-
foot mountain passes in Land Cruisers, stop-
ping for the occasional yak. The area is so
remote that many of the people there were
seeing Westerners for the first time.
Travis Winn, Kristen McDonald and Na Ming Hui
and have fun,” says Winn.
“It was classic,” he says, “Grand Canyon
rapids followed by fast water.” The rafts sped
along at seven to eight miles per hour through
narrow canyons and high granite peaks. The
rafters experienced miles and miles of “roller-
coaster rapids.” They saw “small villages,
high up,” says Winn.
Prayer flags
according to McDonald. They saw the tracks of
Tibetan black bears as well as their scat.
“What makes us driven to these really
remote places is not conquering but feeling
like we are doing something for the first
time,” she says.
The rafters encountered huge, 20-foot
ocean sized “Waimea waves” as they contin-
‘They thought we were crazy; a woman saw the boats
and ran screaming away.’ — Kristen McDonald
The villagers “had never seen a white per-
son, let along a crazy contraption called a
raft,” says McDonald. The rafters wore bright
colored dry suits, life jackets and helmets,
which along with their safety orange and yel-
low crafts, made them look even stranger.
“Tibetans believe rivers are a sacred
place, a place of spirits, not of humans,” says
McDonald. “They thought we were crazy,”
she says. “A woman saw the boats and ran
screaming away.”
At one point the rafters met an elderly
Tibetan man who had never left the Salween
Canyon. He walks the banks of the river each
day with his herd of yaks, carrying an umbrel-
la to protect him from the sun. The Tibetan
member of the team, Chongdak, an avid rafter
since 2002, served as translator between the
ued down the river, but got through safely.
Sometimes the canyon walls were so high, the
only way to scout the rapids was by sending
the kayakers on ahead through the class IV
rapids. Chongdak and Na Ming Hui flipped in
their raft on the last day of the trip, but in the
end, all the rafters emerged unscathed, and
exhilarated, even if a little wet.
Dam Building
Having discovered a river that rivals
America’s best rafting rivers in its rapids and
its pristine wilderness, McDonald and Winn
now want to stop that river from being
dammed, inundating the flora and fauna as
well as the homes of the people who love
there.
“As foreigners, it’s not appropriate or
‘It wasn’t a culture clash; we had wonderful interactions.’
— Kristen McDonald
team and the people they met. “It wasn’t a cul-
ture clash,” says McDonald, “we had wonder-
ful interactions.”
The scenery was “amazing,” she says. The
rafters, when they weren’t negotiating the
whitewater, saw Tibetan eagles, hawks and the
blue sheep that are the prey of the snow leopard,
productive for us to go in and say, ‘Don’t build
a dam,’” says Winn. “One thing we can do is
bring people to see these places.”
He is excited not only about bringing
Westerners in to experience these rivers, but
more importantly showing the Chinese the
wonders of their own country: “Rivers have
put the project on hold in 2004 until a better
assessment of the impacts of the dams can be
done, the International Rivers Network says
that China Huadian Corporation and the
Yunan provincial government are still at work
on a scaled back version of the project.
If the project is finished, it would move
ANTON GRIESSBACH
The rafters planned their trip down the
river using a declassified Russian topographic
map from 1942 and satellite images from
Google Earth. But the only way to get to know
the river, its rapids and whirlpools, was to put
the rafts and kayaks in and go.
After months of planning and thousands
of miles of travel, the river trip seemed like it
would end before it began. The river levels
were dangerously high from the recent rains.
While they waited in hopes the water would
drop to a level safe for rafting, a Buddhist
monastery in the town of Sadêng sponta-
neously decided to host the team.
The monks there welcomed the rafters and
invited them in to prayer sessions and for
games of tug-o-war. “While they were praying
for rain, we where praying for sunshine,”
laughs Winn. Winn, who’s getting ready to
graduate UO’s Clark Honors College, had to
make what he called, “the hardest decision of
my life,” when it came time to decide whether
to try the river. After a test run on one of the
Salween’s tributaries and with blessings from
the monks written on their rafting gear, the
rafters decided to go for it.
They were rewarded right away with
“three and half miles of nonstop Class III plus
whitewater — you could just sit in the middle
potential for bringing rural and urban Chinese
together. I know it can happen — it’s just in
the details.”
Many of China’s rivers are endangered by
hydroelectric projects. Perhaps the best
known is the Three Gorges Dam that forced
the relocation of more than a million people,
and the waters are covering unknown amounts
of natural and cultural heritage and even caus-
ing earthquakes. Problems from the dam proj-
ect such as toxic algae and landslides are mak-
ing the news in China and abroad. It was
recently revealed that while the U.S. largely
stayed out of that project, Canada provided
major support.
The hydroelectric project planned for the
Salween involves 13 dams on the section of
the river that flows through China’s Yunan
Province, says McDonald, who is researching
and writing about this project for her doctoral
dissertation. The Salween project is supposed-
ly larger than the Three Gorges Dam.
The project is currently on hold, but the
rafters floated by the construction of at least
one hydroelectric project on the river during
their trip. McDonald compares the “develop-
ment at all costs” mentality that can be found
in China to a charging elephant: “It’s really
hard to slow it down.”
So even as Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao
Tibetan monks check out the rafters
Prayer flags in the mountains of Tibet
JANUARY 3, 2008 13