Flying Off Everest

by Dave Costello

  Physically, the Ganges is one of the most polluted rivers on the planet, running 1,516 miles through one of the most populated river basins in the world. Rising as an unassuming gray, silt-laden meltwater creek at about 13,000 feet from the toe of the Gangotri Glacier, just a few miles south of the Chinese border in northeastern India, Ganga’s awe-inspiring beauty is tarnished quickly by the humans who worship her. Just 11 miles downstream from the source, the village of Gangotri dumps almost all of its waste directly into the river. Less than 60 miles farther south, just above the town of Uttarkashi, the Ganges is dammed up and diverted through pipes to feed turbines to generate electricity. Uttarkashi, like the rest of the cities along the Ganges, also dumps almost all of its waste into the river. Just to the south of town, a cement factory pours slurry directly into the Ganges through a pipe. Below that, the Theri Dam plugs the river up entirely, creating a reservoir over 20 miles long and 3 miles wide. The trend continues as the Ganges flows southeast toward the Bay of Bengal, where it is dammed again at Farakka by a river-wide barrage* and continually drained to precariously low levels for irrigation. Locals believe that Mother Ganga, being a purifying goddess, can’t actually be polluted or destroyed.

  At Varanasi, one of the holiest sites along the mighty river’s banks, water samples taken from the river often contain more fecal coliform bacteria (feces) than water molecules—making the Ganges, only about halfway through its journey to the sea, a veritable river of shit. Heavy metals and toxic chemicals are dumped into it from tanneries and factories built all along its banks without even a semblance of regulation. A toxic green-brown sludge forms along the water’s edge, where people bathe, wash their dishes, and fetch their drinking water each day.

  The Ganges is also one of the few places in the world where if you see a human body floating in the river, you don’t have to call the police. Families of the recently deceased travel from all over India to deposit the remains of their loved ones in its waters, with the belief that Ganga will deliver the dead to Nirvana, the Hindu version of heaven. According to some local traditions, unmarried individuals aren’t supposed to be cremated, so they are simply placed in the river, their bodies left to float downstream to decay. Many poor families can’t afford to purchase enough sandalwood to properly cremate the deceased that were married, so it’s not uncommon to see a partially burnt body washed up on shore or swirling idly in a trash-filled eddy. Feral dogs prowl the river edge, feeding on the corpses.

  In eastern Bihar, where the Ganges joins with the Sun Kosi, the river is sluggish, moving no more than 2 miles per hour through a broad, flat plain stretching off as far as the eye can see. The water and surrounding air are warm and sticky—a far cry from the raging glacial torrents of either the Ganga’s or Sun Kosi’s Himalayan headwaters. There are few towns or even villages. As the river approaches the coast, it begins to divide and subdivide into a labyrinth of smaller rivers, eventually seeping obscurely into the ocean through a vast mangrove forest inhabited by man-eating tigers and poisonous snakes.

  It is a long, hard road to Nirvana.

  Although it had been raining for the past several days, a full moon covered Babu, Lakpa, and Krishna’s camp in a silver half-light. The tepid water at the edge of the riverbank glinted brightly with it. It was the team’s fourth night on the Ganges, and they could see clear across the river to the tall grass on the other side, even though it was a little before 11:00 p.m. and, otherwise, completely dark. The night before, they had woken up in the midst of a light rain next to a corpse. “A dog was eating it,” Lakpa says. The lower half of the body was missing.

  On this full-moon night, their tarp shelter lay collapsed on the ground at their feet, covered in sand. One of the corner stakes had been pulled out. Lakpa counted nine shadowy faces standing around them. None of them looked pleased. He couldn’t understand what Babu and Krishna were saying to them, or what they said in return, but he knew it wasn’t good.

  Suddenly, one of the shadowy strangers grabbed Lakpa’s wallet out of his pocket. Lakpa shoved him hard in the chest, knocking the man over. Krishna began to shout in Hindi. Babu held up his own wallet, offering it to the men, who were obviously now even more angry than they had been before. They took it, along with Lakpa’s wallet and mobile phone, and moved off grumbling into the grass. In a matter of a few minutes, the Nepalis had lost all of their money and their only means of communication with the outside world besides their GPS tracker, which was stashed in one of the boats.

  They hurriedly packed up camp, shoving their collapsed tarp shelter unceremoniously into the back of the tandem kayak. The moon continued to shine, as if nothing had happened. Getting into their boats, they could hear the strange men returning. They could hear voices getting closer through the tall grass. They had nothing more to give them besides their boats and their lives, and they didn’t care to wait around to find out which they would take next.

  They then paddled out to the center of the river and pointed their bows downstream, watching as the thieves collected on the shoreline where their camp had been, shouting after them. After a few minutes they heard a motor start. Looking behind them, they could see a small wooden fishing boat pursuing them slowly across the surface of the smooth, silver-colored water. After a few minutes of frantic paddling, they realized that the boat wasn’t gaining on them. It evidently had a small motor.

  The next few hours proved to be a surreal, slow-speed on-water chase: a handmade rowboat with a tiny outboard motor, filled with bandits, chasing three Nepali kayakers in the moonlight along the Ganges through the Indian Terai. Babu, Lakpa, and Krishna remained silent as they paddled as fast as they could, which seemed to keep them about 100 yards ahead of the boat. It was a losing battle, they knew. Unless their pursuers ran out of gas soon, the kayakers couldn’t keep up the pace long enough to stay ahead of them all night.

  Then the moon began to go dark. The silver-shrouded plains faded into black. The water around them lost its inky sheen. They paid little attention to the slight change in light, but it was there, growing darker by the minute. By 11:53 p.m. the sky was completely black. That’s when they noticed there was a gaping hole in the sky where the moon had been just a few minutes before. It was a full lunar eclipse—a complete blackout. The last one had been forty years earlier, on August 6, 1971. The next isn’t expected until June 15, 2058.*

  Babu, Lakpa, and Krishna paddled toward a grassy island in the middle of the river. Once on shore, they quickly tucked themselves and the boats into the weeds, hoping the newfound darkness would help them avoid detection. Then they waited, listening to the sound of the motorboat move down the river past them. When the eclipse ended and moonlight flooded the plains once more, they could still see the boat puttering downstream in the distance. They could do nothing as they watched it turn around and putter upstream straight back at them.

  “They went up and down the river, looking for us all night and most of the morning,” Lakpa says. With daylight, the men in the boat left, motoring downstream where Babu, Lakpa, and Krishna knew they had to follow.

  After a few minutes of nerve-wracking paddling, wondering if the boatmen were hiding in the weeds and waiting for them, Babu, Lakpa, and Krishna came around a left-facing bend in the river. The river itself is miles wide, interspersed with flat sandbars leading down stagnant dead-end channels. In the distance they could see a low, faint line running across the water through the morning haze: the Farakka Barrage. They could also see that the boat that had been chasing them was now on river left, which they didn’t know at the time leads into Bangladesh. They paddled to river right, where some men with guns promptly stopped them.

  The Farakka Barrage is more than 1.5 miles long, stretching the entire width of the Ganges at its most narrow point as it turns east into Bangladesh. It forces a significant portion of the river’s water into a 23-mile-long concrete-lined feeder canal that leads to the Hugli River, which then flows out through Kolkata to the Bay of Bengal. The barrage consists of 108 ir
on gates that either allow some of the river to flow along its natural course into neighboring Bangladesh or don’t. More often than not, they don’t. Bangladesh isn’t happy about it, but there’s not much they can do. The barrage is on Indian soil and protected twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, by armed guards posted every 65 feet along its length. Photography is strictly prohibited. It’s also very likely the largest man-made structure in the world that doesn’t actually work. At least, not the way it was supposed to.

  The problem with Farakka begins nearly 220 miles south at the port city of Kolkata on the banks of the Hugli River. As far back as 1852, the East India Company was worried about the long-term viability of the port, which they controlled at the time. It was silting up, getting shallower every year. It was a natural thing. The mouth of the Hugli had been continually silting up and changing its course to the sea for thousands of years. The East India Company predicted, correctly, that this would eventually pose a fairly serious problem to the shipping industry there.

  A British engineer named Sir Arthur Cotton was the first to suggest that the mighty Ganges River, running hundreds of miles to the north into Bangladesh, could actually be diverted down into the Hugli and thus (theoretically) clear out the silt from the port of Kolkata with the extra flow it would generate through the port. The idea was considered briefly, then rejected. In 1930, as the Hugli continued to get shallower, the Bengal Chamber of Commerce reconsidered the idea but again rejected it. Later the Indian government took the idea seriously enough to study it for twenty years: from 1951 to 1971. Then, without any international agreement with Bangladesh, from which they would be diverting the water and which was at that time still part of Pakistan, they built the barrage. It took five years. A small town cropped up beside the barrage in the middle of the Terai to house the workers who were constructing it. The town, called Farakka Barrage Township, was laid out as a grid, neatly subdivided by letter and number into row after row of anonymous cream-colored concrete buildings surrounded by barbed wire.

  Unfortunately, Farakka Barrage didn’t work. The port of Kolkata is still getting shallower. Nothing has changed, except that Bangladesh is now receiving half the water from the Ganges it once did and flooding in the Bihar has gotten even worse. The waters of the Ganges just flood around Farakka’s embankments, which, similar to the ones on the Sun Kosi, need to be regularly rebuilt. Now that less of the Ganges flow is going into Bangladesh along its original course, salt water from the Bay of Bengal has also crept almost 60 miles farther up into the Sunderbans than it had previously been able to, in effect killing a large portion of the world’s largest mangrove forest.* There’s also a significant amount of silt building up behind the barrage itself, which continually needs to be dredged to allow what little boat traffic there is through the gates.

  Talking to the guards, Babu told the armed men standing on the shore that he and his companions were actually Indians traveling back to Kolkata from Darjeeling. It was an exceedingly unlikely story. Darjeeling is over 200 miles to the north of Farakka.

  “Why didn’t you just take a bus or the train?” they asked, eyeing the two odd-looking, bright orange and red boats.

  “Too expensive,” Babu said. “How much is it to get through the gate?”

  They told him 22,000 Indian rupees (about $360). Babu, Lakpa, and Krishna had no money among the three of them after being robbed the night before. They didn’t even have that much to begin with when they started out from Lukla. Babu told the guards about the robbery. This got them an invitation to the nearby guardhouse to have some food, for which Babu, Lakpa, and Krishna were very grateful. They hadn’t eaten in over twenty-four hours. The guards told Babu and Krishna—Lakpa couldn’t understand what they were saying in Hindi—that they couldn’t let them through the barrage without payment, but they could let them walk around it with their boats to the feeder canal, which leads to the Hugli River. “That’s the way you want to go, if you’re trying to get to Kolkata,” the guards told them. “The other gate leads to Bangladesh.”

  After thanking the guards for their help, Babu, Lakpa, and Krishna retrieved their boats and carried them up and over the embankment to the concrete-lined feeder canal on the other side. They paddled across and set up their camp on the left side of the canal, opposite of Farakka Barrage Township. Leaving Lakpa once again with the gear, Babu and Krishna paddled the tandem across to the town, found a phone, and put in a call to Phinney in San Francisco.

  “They had been robbed of all their money,” Phinney says. “They had a tough time getting around the dam and were tired and unsure what to do. They had no water left and food was again running low.” She told them that she would wire them some money via Western Union, which she knew after a quick Google search had a branch in Farakka. After collecting the money from the bank, Babu and Krishna purchased more food and water and brought it back across the river to Lakpa. The next morning they continued paddling south through the feeder canal toward Kolkata, still over 180 miles away.

  Phinney updated the blog:

  17/06/2011 Ultimate Descent Team

  Posted on June 17, 2011 by ruppy.kp

  05:53:52 AM After a few days of trouble near Farakka, we have left the main stream of the ganges, and are continuing through India via the Hooghly River … Manys days of rain and little food..

  Two days later, she updated it again:

  19/06/2011 Ultimate Descent Team

  Posted on June 19, 2011 by ruppy.kp

  08:45:22 AM Still kayaking, see Gps for location

  During that time, Babu, Lakpa, and Krishna paddled steadily on, covering nearly 20 miles per day. They could see the white, pus-filled infections growing steadily on their feet, hands, and bodies. They stayed in ashrams, temples built to help house religious pilgrims along the banks of the Ganges, whenever they could. During the nights they couldn’t find an ashram, they picked a forsaken spot on the shoreline and pitched their tarp. Babu and Krishna explained away the oddity of themselves and their boats being there by telling anyone who asked that they were pilgrims on their way to Ganga Sagar, the official holy end of the Ganges. This was partly true, although slightly misleading in the fact that they weren’t religious pilgrims. They were adventuring pilgrims.

  “A few people asked us where we had bought the boats,” Lakpa says. They were interested in buying either one of the ones that Babu and Lakpa or Krishna was paddling, or a new one of their own. “We told them we got the boats in Kolkata,” Lakpa says. Babu or Krishna would then give them a fake number to a factory that didn’t exist.

  Nine days after leaving Farakka, the team paddled into Kolkata, a bustling metropolis of over fourteen million people. The skyscrapers were the closest things to mountains they had seen in weeks. They had been on the river for twenty-one days and looked remarkably out of place floating through the city in their bright red and orange plastic boats. So out of place, some policemen standing on the shoreline called out for them to stop.

  “We just waved and said, ‘Namaste!’” Lakpa recalls. They just kept paddling. The police officers, lacking a boat, could do little more than watch them go.

  A few miles downstream, they stopped under a bridge next to a pile of garbage. They buried the kayaks and their gear under the garbage, walked into town, and ordered a large pizza.

  Babu, Lakpa, and Krishna knew they were getting close to the ocean. They could see the river rise and lower each day with the tide. Babu and Krishna, who had never seen the ocean before, thought this odd. They hadn’t heard of tides. Phinney told them that night over the phone that the southern tip of Sagar Island was only about 50 miles to the south. They were sick, tired, and covered in sores but almost done with the first-ever Everest summit-to-sea expedition.

  Ironically, the only other person to have completed a similar feat did it in reverse, twenty-one years earlier.

  On February 5, 1990, a lanky, dark-haired Australian named Tim Macartney-Snape went for a swim in the Bay of Bengal on the southern tip o
f Sagar Island—the very same beach on which Babu and Lakpa were about to end their expedition—and then walked through northeastern India to Nepal, where he then climbed Mount Everest via the South Col route, solo. It took him just over three months, almost the same amount of time it took Babu and Lakpa to climb Everest and descend to the ocean. It was more or less the same trip Babu and Lakpa were about to finish, just backward, without paragliding or kayaking.

  Macartney-Snape also had an entourage of support drivers, film crew, sherpas, liaison officers, and his wife, although he insisted on carrying all of his own supplies in an effort to maintain some semblance of self-sufficiency. Notably, he climbed Everest without the aid of supplemental oxygen. Afterward he claimed that he was the first person to have truly climbed all of Everest’s 29,035 feet, which technically was correct. No one else had ever traveled from sea level to the top of Everest without the aid of some sort of motorized vehicle. Macartney-Snape also made a movie and wrote a book about his expedition, each one titled Everest: From Sea to Summit, and then started his own gear company, which he called, not surprisingly, Sea to Summit.

  A man wearing a loincloth stood barefoot at the edge of Ganga Sagar. He was alone on the beach. A dense, dark green jungle reared up out of the sand about a half mile behind him. The ocean was gray, reflecting the clouds above. It was difficult to tell, looking out at the horizon, where the water stopped and the sky began. He turned and watched, with no visible display of surprise, as three men paddled slowly past him out of the mangrove forest in two brightly colored little boats and into the shore break—as if they were going to just keep paddling straight out into the Bay of Bengal. He had no idea they’d come all the way from the summit of Mount Everest: over 500 miles from the top of the world.

  Water splashed over the bows of Babu, Lakpa, and Krishna’s boats as they paddled through the 3-foot-high waves hitting the shore. The spray of the ocean tasted salty on their lips. There was no more river ahead of them, just a broad, flat, gray horizon line. Their summit-to-sea journey was over, but Lakpa was too tired to sing.