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11/15/07Kayaking in Tibet
Nick Allan - Omega Contributor
Forget Seven Years in Tibet. Last May, 12 adventure guiding students in the Adventure Studies program battled turbulent rapids, bushwhacked through remote jungle terrain and explored the Jet Po River.
These students were the second group of kayakers ever to navigate the river. More importantly, they travelled with a purpose, lending a hand to Braille Without Borders.
“Beyond the activity, why do you travel? It’s all about the human experience,” said adventure studies instructor Sharman Learie. “The Buddhist belief is: What have you done to deserve to be blind? Blind kids in Tibet are totally shunned.”
The students planned a detour in their expedition to help Braille Without Borders, an association that helps the blind. They decided to take a class of blind children kayaking.
“We went to a school for the blind and outfitted them with wetsuits, helmets and (personal flotation devices) and played around on the river,” said third-year adventure tourism student Greg Simmonds.
“My favourite part of the trip was working with the Braille Without Borders kids and seeing how life on the other side of the world is,” he said. “They loved it. They were apprehensive at first but it quickly shifted to water fights. Their aim is amazing!”
The students planned the expedition and did all the fundraising. The trip cost $5000 for four weeks. Students raised money by selling calendars with photos of previous trips on them and by teaching kayaking lessons.
“A number of us are kayak instructors, so we took over the pool and taught local high school kids to river kayak,” said Simmonds.
“Adventure tourism is in its infancy in Tibet,” Learie said. “This way the students get to see what international guiding is like first-hand. This was the first time it was a truly international expedition, usually we end up paddling in Idaho.”
The expedition spanned more than two weeks in remote areas. The students spent five days in Lhasa, Tibet to acclimatize beforehand. “When you’re flying into that altitude you can walk up two floors and be winded even if you’re in good shape,” Learie said.
“Driving to Eastern Tibet, I had the preconceived notion that it would be like Seven Years in Tibet.”
The climate was very dusty and rocky. However, in the valleys it was very tropical. They went to the Grand Bend of the Yarlung river. The Yarlung is the major river that drains into India from the Himalayas and is supposed to be where the lost city of Shangri-La is located.
“The Yarlung is the Mount Everest of the paddling world. We were the first ascent in three years into the Jet Po,” Learie said. The Jet Po is a connecting river to the Yarlung bend.
“It was the second time anybody had kayaked it,” he said. Navigating the bend, they paddled down the Po Sang Po, which connects with the Yarlung.
“No boater in their mind would get on this…the white water was too difficult,” Learie said. However, he said it was one of the highlights of the trip.
The student-explorers went ashore and camped in the jungle. “There were deep walled canyons and misty, cloud-shrouded rainforest,” Learie said.
The group had to bushwhack to avoid large rapids in that section of the river.
‘There were huge areas of bamboo,” Learie said. “We came to these ruins and had no idea how old they were. We just stumbled across them and felt like archaeologists.”
“It wasn’t in any guidebook but it looked like it was a monastery at one point,” he said. One hundred kilometers up stream, the ancestral owners had built a channel at the same elevation as the river and siphoned water to the monastery.
“It was incredible. This thing was mostly done by hand,” Learie said.
Nine students in total made the trip, along with two Tibetan assistant guides.
Check out the website : www.trutibet.com
An upcoming Adventure Studies program info session is Thursday, Nov. 22, at 4 p.m. OM1201 Pre-Registration is required so please phone: 250-828-5221
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