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Mekong river update: "Until now the river had twice shocked me"

Agu 19, 2004 12: 19 EST
Aussie Mick O’Shea plans to be the first person to navigate the Mekong River from the Tibetan Plateau to the South China Sea. He is dispatching to wetdawg.com, and has begun his four-month solo paddle. In our previous report, Mick was just starting out:

"Finally we came over a ridge of glacial gravel and rocks and there was the Lasagongma glacier right in front of us. I was ecstatic. I headed over to the base of the glacier where Doujie and Jimmie were busy prostrating in front of a large dark rock located by the point where a small thread of water trickled from the ice. Here, the Mekong began.

What a great privilege it will be to travel along this incredible phenomenon from source to sea. With that thought in mind I trudged back down the glacier to where the team were waiting and the descent of the Mekong began. From our planning and observations we estimated that it would be a trek downstream of 140 kilometers before the frozen river would defrost enough to start paddling."

We heard nothing more for a while, but now a few more dispatches has arrived. The last report was from August 8:

"A five day detour to the Zongdjian horse racing festival gave our bodies some time to recover and one last glimpse of the rich Tibetan cultural heritage before entering a new cultural realm of Lisu, Bai and Han farmers. As expected the Mekong rose several feet in our absence and was less than 2 meters below the high water mark when we set off from the Lincang bridge.

As the water volume increased so too did the level of chaos encountered class IV - V runs were followed by class IV - V boils, whirlpools and surges. It was an awesome section of whitewater and we thoroughly enjoyed it.

From 200 meters upstream we could see the horizon line drop away significantly and mist rise up from the violence. We eddied out on river right just above the drop to inspect the rapid and to our relief it looked runnable but with the light fading fast it was best left until the next day. Camp was set in the scenic gorge and we settled in for a night under the stars.

Until now the river had twice shocked me with lessons in my own mortality and instilled me with a million moments of wonder. Constantly alive and relentlessly transforming the world through which I travelled, the Mekong, to my mind, is in fact a living, evolving entity.

In front of us lay a motionless body of water, devoid of character and strength. It was fed by the Mekong yet it contained none of the traits that I had come to know and deeply respect throughout the journey.

On the web news we encountered just before starting this section we read that down stream nations were experiencing some of the lowest Mekong water levels on record, negatively affecting millions of local farmers and fishermen. Yet where we were, just a few hundred kilometers north of Thailand, Laos and Myanmar the river was nearly full."

Check out Mick's full dispatches on WetDawg.com.

The Mekong is one of the world's major rivers. It is the 12th longest in the world, and the 10th largest by volume. From Tibet it runs through China, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. The extreme seasonal variations in flow and the presence of rapids and waterfalls have made navigation extremely difficult.

The river's source, is uncertain, due to the existence of several tributaries in an inaccessible environment. Chinese researchers believe that the source is located in the Jifu Mountains in Zaduo County, Yushu Tibet Autonomous Prefecture of northwest China's Qinghai Province, which is some 5,200 meters above sea level. An earlier expedition, led by Michel Peissel, placed the source at the head of the Rupsa-La pass (further west, at an altitude of 4975 meters).

Approximately half the river's length is in Tibet and China. Much of this stretch consists of deep gorges, and the river leaves China at an altitude of only 500 meters.

The river next forms the border between Myanmar and Thailand for 200 km, at the end of which it meets the tributary Ruak River at the Golden Triangle. This point also marks the division between the Upper and Lower Mekong.

The river then divides Laos and Thailand, before a stretch passing through Laos alone. The Lao stretch is characterised by gorges, rapids and depths of as little as half a meter in the dry season. It widens south of Luang Prabang, where it has been known to flood to 4 km in width and 100 meters in depth, although its course remains extremely inconsistent. The falls are all but impassable to river traffic. In Cambodia, the Sambor rapids are the last to impede navigation, before the river ends in Vietnam.

Members of the French Mekong Expedition of 1866 ascended the river from its mouth to Yunnan between 1866 to 1868. Their chief finding was that the Mekong had too many falls and rapids to ever be useful for navigation.

The Mekong flows North to South for over 3,000 miles, passing by dozens of different ecological biomes from the Polar Desert of the Tibetan Plateau through Pine forest, Tropical Evergreen Rainforest to the marshes and mangroves of the Delta. The Mekong Basin has a biodiversity as rich as the Amazon’s. the river system boasts an estimated 1,300 different species of fish. Mega Fauna include endangered Irrawaddy Dolphins, Crocodiles, Snow Leopards, Clouded Leopards, Tigers, Sun Bear and Asian Elephant.

The two most controversial current issues are the building of dams and the blasting of rapids.

Mick is a co-founder of Wildside Eco-Tourism Company and a pioneer of paddle sports and eco-tourism in several countries of East Asia. Mick began toying with the concept of paddling the entire Mekong River after navigating several un-boated sections of the river in Laos and Cambodia in 2000/2001.

Image of Red Bottom Rapids on the Mekong River, Photo by Steve Van Beek, courtesy www.shangri-la-river-expeditions.com

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