IX

Mother Ganga

Koshi Tappu Wildlife Reserve, Nepal,
June 6, 2011—Approximately 290 Feet

Sitting atop ancient bicycles with old rusty chains, Babu, Lakpa, and Shri Hari rode in single file along a narrow footpath through tall grass. The sun beat down hot on their backs as the bikes squeaked beneath their weight, groaning metallically with each bump. A small cloud of dust chased them. Sporadic patches of Indian rosewood cast sun-dappled shadows on the gold-green swamps surrounding them. The Mahabharat Mountains, where they had come from just the day before, looked dark and hazy in the distance. Bristled grassbirds, swamp francolins, and Finn’s weavers flew through the air. Sweat beaded on the men’s foreheads and dripped slowly into their eyes. They had been biking like this all day. Headed south, vaguely toward India.

Other than knowing that they were somewhere deep within the heart of the 68-square-mile Koshi Tappu Wildlife Reserve along the Nepal/India border, and somewhere west of the Sun Kosi, none of them had any idea where they were. “We were lost,” Lakpa admits. They had no maps with them. Shri Hari carried a bag with his camera gear, which he took out occasionally to film Babu and Lakpa riding in front of him through the grass. This scene grew old quickly, though, and he eventually stopped filming altogether.

Lakpa and Babu carried a few packets of dried ramen-style noodles and two water bottles, which they had purchased back in Chatra. There they had said good-bye to Madhukar and Resham, who had returned with the support raft to Kathmandu. One of Babu’s friends in Chatra, Mani Kumar Rai, had lent them the bicycles when they told him they needed a way to get through the wildlife reserve.

The idea had been for Babu, Lakpa, and Shri Hari to ride the borrowed bikes through the reserve and across the India border to avoid garnering too much attention from the Indian authorities, from whom they did not have permission—namely in the form of valid visas—to enter the country. They had told the Nepali park officials on the north end of the reserve near Chatra that they intended to camp in the park. The lie worked, even though they didn’t have any camping equipment. Krishna could get the kayaks and the rest of the gear across the border in a hired truck if he didn’t have Shri Hari’s camera gear or too many people with him, they figured. They planned to bike as fast as they could to the southern end of the reserve, meet up with Krishna and the kayaks, and then continue downstream from there.

Their water bottles were now empty. There was no sign of the river—just a flat, broad, swampy plain with a few rolling hills and trees sticking out of it as it stretched out to the horizon. Their mouths were dry when they finally saw a metal spigot on the side of the path that afternoon. They stopped, pumped the handle, and drank their fill when they saw a steady stream of off-colored water pour out of it.

Krishna, meanwhile, was parked at the India border in a hired jeep along with their two kayaks. It was the second time he had been called to negotiate on Babu and Lakpa’s behalf in the past forty-eight hours. The day before, he had hired a motorboat to take him back upriver to the Big Dipper rapid, where Babu and Lakpa had swam and lost their paddles. He had discovered them in the possession of two different men on the riverside who had found each of the paddles separately. They asked Krishna for money when he requested their return. He gave the first one 200 rupees (about $2) for his trouble. The second one he ended up giving 400 rupees (about $4) when the man said no to 200.

“Where are you going?” one of the border patrol asked him.

“Just down there,” Krishna said, pointing to the beach on the river just beyond the checkpoint. The two kayaks were on top of the jeep, tied on with rope. “We’re going paddling.” He didn’t tell the officer he was going to paddle nearly 300 miles to the ocean.

Back in the wildlife reserve, Babu, Lakpa, and Shri Hari suddenly stumbled across a paved road running perpendicular to the dirt path they were on. They turned left and headed east, figuring the river had to still be somewhere in that direction. They couldn’t have passed over one of the largest rivers draining the Himalaya without noticing it. After a few minutes of easy biking on smooth pavement, they descended into a wide valley—the Sun Kosi running slow and wide through the middle of it. Eventually, they saw Krishna waiting for them with their gear at the bottom along the bank of the river.

As the sun approached the western horizon, they said good-bye to Shri Hari, who framed one last shot with his camera of Babu, Lakpa, and Krishna paddling away. Then he got into the hired jeep Krishna had taken across the border and headed back to Chatra. The next day, he caught a bus back to Kathmandu, leaving Babu, Lakpa, and Krishna to film the remainder of the expedition themselves. He didn’t have a boat to use, and the raft had already returned with Madhukar and Resham to the capital, so Shri Hari couldn’t follow his friends any farther. He had captured nearly one hundred hours of footage, mostly of Babu and Lakpa milling about Everest Base Camp or swimming on the Sun Kosi. The Arrufats still had the footage of the takeoff with them back in Pokhara, which Hamilton Pevec was in the midst of feverishly editing in the back room of their house.

Babu, Lakpa, and Krishna now just had to paddle about 300 miles of flat water through India, following the Sun Kosi to its confluence with the Ganges and out to the Bay of Bengal—with almost no money, and no maps to guide them.*

Lakpa could now see three things in front of him: the bulbous orange bow of his and Babu’s boat, murky brown water, and sky. The other side of the river was over 3 miles away, somewhere beyond a watery horizon line. The riverbank behind him was sandy and flat, like the river. They had entered the Terai in the Indian state of Bihar, the great, flat floodplains that drain the enormous snowfields of the Himalaya.

The Sun Kosi has a bad reputation in India. The river, which is nearly doubled in size after its confluence with the Arun and Tamur above Chatra, is actually referred to as the “Sorrow of Bihar.” In Hindu folklore the River of Gold is said to be a woman who dreads marriage, which is a very bad thing in Hindu folklore. The monikers make sense when you consider the fact that India ranks second only to its swampy neighbor, Bangladesh, in terms of flooding casualties. The country accounts for about 20 percent of deluge-related deaths in the world, and it’s primarily because of the considerable amount of water and silt the Sun Kosi carries down from Nepal into Bihar.

Almost every year during the monsoon, just south of the Nepalese border, the Sun Kosi floods to within a hair’s breadth of destroying absolutely everything even remotely near it. Often, it does. In two hundred years the river’s 111-mile-long outlet into the Ganges—the so-called Kosi Fan—has shifted over 120 miles from west to east. That’s over half a mile per year. Outside of the Hwang Ho in China, the Sun Kosi carries more silt than any other river in the world. And it dumps it all on the gridiron-flat plains of the Bihar. It’s no wonder economic development has stagnated in the region. The Kosi Fan is the poorest area in India’s poorest state.

The Indian government attempted to alleviate the flood problem on the Sun Kosi by building embankments along the existing river channel in the last century, hoping to contain the river. The river simply poured over the embankments and broke them, necessitating continual reconstruction at an exorbitant cost. In the years it didn’t break the embankments, it backed up and flooded the land to either side, not allowing the fields to drain as they always had. Already half-drowned locals began contracting kala-azar, a horrific disease of the eyes resulting from living in perpetually waterlogged areas. The solution to the Sun Kosi’s flooding problem turned out to be another problem, and a rather large one at that.

The Kosi Fan and Gangetic floodplains are so inaccessible to the police and their vehicles that poor local farmers have realized they can rob everything in sight without any real fear of being caught, let alone punished. The Bihar, the birthplace of Buddhism, has thus become known as India’s lawless state. It’s why Madhukar and Resham left Babu, Lakpa, and Krishna in Chatra and returned to Kathmandu with the Paddle Nepal raft. Kelly and Nim Magar, co-owners of Paddle Nepal—arguably the expedition’s only real sponsor besides Peak UK and Kimberly Phinney—ordered them to return.

“I didn’t want to send my raft and equipment with the Paddle Nepal company name on it in case anything should happen there,” Nim says.

After hiding their kayaks in the tall grass along the riverbank that night, Babu and Krishna went to talk to a man who was herding cattle nearby. Lakpa stayed hidden with the boats. Unlike Babu and Krishna, who had both traveled in India for kayaking, Lakpa didn’t know how to speak Hindi. His two friends would have to do the talking for him so long as they were in India, even though well over three hundred different languages are actually spoken there.*

The two brothers brought back bread and some raw beef, which Krishna cooked over their small camp stove. They had no other food with them besides a few packages of dried noodles and some rice they had bought in Chatra. The plan was to pick up supplies as they went along. They set up camp that night under an orange Peak UK tarp, which had been shipped to them along with the tandem kayak by Pete Astles. They propped it up like an A-frame with two paddles, one on either side.

Before the sun rose the next morning, both Lakpa and Babu woke up feeling sick. Krishna, who hadn’t imbibed the dirty well water the day before in the wildlife reserve, felt fine. The three of them quietly packed up their camp and continued downriver with Babu and Lakpa’s intestines groaning. Occasionally, the two would paddle hurriedly off to the bank to relieve their illness on the sand. “Too much diarrhea,” Lakpa says.

By midday they decided that it was too hot to be on the water, so they set up their tarp shelter in the grass for shade as far away from people as they could. As the sun began to set, they got on the water again, and they continued paddling until after dark, when they found a spot to camp that they deemed safe. Babu and Krishna left Lakpa to guard the hidden kayaks as they went in search of food.

“In the mountains everybody moves slowly,” Lakpa says. “Everything. Even the trees are slowly growing. We come lower and lower, and people are cleverer. We don’t have that much stuff. If someone took our stuff, what would we do? How would we survive?” They were all acutely aware of the danger they were in and tried their best to avoid the notoriously thievish people of the Bihar by paddling early in the day and late in the evening. Nothing attracts thieves quite like paddling a 12-foot-long bright orange boat.

They set up camp each night and broke it down each morning in the dark, camouflaging their kayaks in the tall grass of the Terai, hiding in the shade of their orange tarp during the afternoon. Lakpa tried not to draw attention to himself when he was left alone with the boats, but sometimes getting noticed while standing next to two large hunks of brightly colored plastic couldn’t be helped. His beard and hair had grown long and shaggy. After his recent bout of diarrhea, he looked starved. “People thought I looked like a Muslim,” Lakpa says—Muslims being much more common and far less suspicious in India than a Nepali Buddhist. “Everybody that passed by would say, ‘As-salamu alaykum.’” He didn’t know any Hindi to explain who he really was or what he was doing, so he didn’t think it prudent to correct them. He replied with the only other phrase of Arabic he knew, “Wa alaykumu s-salam!”* This was usually enough to allow the Indians to affirm their assumptions and continue on their way without creating too much of a scene.

They procured an Indian cell phone, with which they called Kimberly Phinney in San Francisco almost daily. “The Ganges was big and I could provide information on which channels to take,” Phinney says. “I would laugh to myself sometimes how odd it was to be sitting in the comfort of my home here in America, guiding three Nepali men down a massive river in India via Google Earth maps.”

After six days in India, Lakpa began to feel immensely lethargic. The muggy heat of the lowlands, which often soaring into the nineties, made the experienced mountaineer, who claimed to smoke cigarettes up to 28,000 feet, feel ill. He was also developing a fierce waterlogged infection on one of his hands and on both of his feet. Krishna could see the white decay of infection growing on one of his own fingers and on the back of his neck. Babu’s stomach still couldn’t hold down food after drinking the dirty well water. He also had an infection on his neck, in the same spot as his brother. They were becoming even skinnier and more gaunt-looking than they already had been, losing weight they couldn’t afford to lose. Still, each morning and night they paddled on through the brown waters of the lower Kosi, snaking their way south toward the Ganges.

Babu called Phinney one morning while standing on the side of the river just outside of Naugachia, a small, annually flood-plagued town about 5 miles from the Sun Kosi’s outlet into the Ganges. Looking on her computer at the live tracking option on their SPOT locator, she told them where they were and asked how they were doing. Babu told her they were doing fine. After hanging up she updated the expedition’s blog for the first time since Babu and Lakpa had started the kayaking portion of their journey a week earlier:

12/06/2011 Ultimate Descent Team

Posted on June 12, 2011 by ruppy.kp

09:24:06 AM Today the Koshi River will merge with the Ganges River

The Ganges River is actually a goddess called Gangadevi, or Mother Ganga, at least according to Hindu mythology. It is the only river considered by a major world religion to be the physical embodiment of a deity. Created from the foot sweat of Lord Vishnu, the supreme god of Hinduism, Ganga reportedly came down from the Milky Way in response to the prayers of an ancient king named Bhagirath. His late great-grandfather, King Sagar, had apparently upset a magical hermit by the name of Kapil Muni over the matter of a stolen horse, and now a good number of his relatives were dead.

King Sagar, a prodigious procreator, had sent sixty thousand of his sixty thousand and one sons looking for the missing animal, and when they found it standing next to Muni at the southern end of Sagar Island* in southeastern India, near present-day Bangladesh and the mouth of the Ganges, they figured that the hermit was probably the one who stole it. So they proceeded to rough him up with enthusiasm. Muni, who hadn’t actually stolen the horse, incinerated King Sagar’s sixty thousand sons into ashes and cursed them all to hell.

Muni then told King Sagar that the only way he could save his sons’ souls was to get Gangadevi, who purified anything and everything she touched, to come down from the heavens and wash over their ashes, releasing them forever from the karmic cycle of death and rebirth—a sort of when-pigs-fly or a-cold-day-in-hell suggestion. Sagar gave his throne to his one remaining son, Amshuman, and went off into the woods to pray. He died before his prayers were answered, so Amshuman then gave the throne to his own son, Dalip, and left for the woods to pick up praying where his deceased father, Sagar, had left off. He died too.

It wasn’t until Dalip’s son, Bhagirath, stood on a rock on one leg high in the Himalaya near present-day Gangotri for a thousand years that Brahma, the Hindu god of creation, finally took notice and asked him what he wanted. Bhagirath told him he wanted to save the souls of his great-great-grandfather’s sons. Brahma told him, sure, he’d be happy to send Ganga down to earth, but suggested that Bhagirath talk to Shiva, another Hindu god, first. Ganga couldn’t come down to earth without someone to catch her fall, apparently, and Shiva would be the one to do it. Ganga would crush and drown the earth, Brahma told him. Bhagirath, unfazed, continued to balance on the rock for another ten thousand years before Shiva showed up and finally agreed to catch Ganga in the locks of his hair. Ganga didn’t want to go, however, so Nandi the bull god drank her—that’s why the Ganges starts at Gaumukh, the “cow’s mouth.” Each lock of hair formed one of the Ganges’s tributaries, like the Alaknanda, Mandakini, Bhagirathi, Satluj, Indus, and Sun Kosi (just to name a few), which all feed into the Ganges from the Himalaya along its course to the sea.

Sagar’s sons were finally saved, and to this day Hindus believe that anyone who bathes in Ganga’s waters will be purified of all sins. And that those who have their ashes or bodies deposited in the river when they die will, likewise, be released from the perpetual karmic cycle of death and rebirth and go directly to Nirvana.

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 iron 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 of 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.

The final 50-mile push to the ocean had passed without much fanfare or incident, other than Babu, Lakpa, and Krishna getting into a fistfight with a group of Bangladeshis over their choice of a campsite their second night out of Kolkata. It had turned out to be on a brick factory’s private property. The factory workers weren’t pleased. After a few swings were taken, the police were called, broke up the fight, and then sent Babu, Lakpa, and Krishna on their way. It had taken three days for them to travel from Kolkata to the southern tip of Sagar Island, to end their journey on an empty beach. A lone man in a loincloth was the only other witness to the successful completion of the first-ever Everest summit-to-sea expedition.

Back on the beach, they asked the man in the loincloth to take their picture. He clicked the shutter once, handed back the camera, and then wandered off. Babu unpacked the mobile and called Phinney in the United States. He told her they had made it to the ocean, but that they were going to leave now, because there were “strange scorpions” on the beach. He would learn later that the scorpions he had seen were actually just harmless crabs. Regardless, they were all ready to be done. It was just after 1:00 p.m., just under three months after they had set out from Kathmandu for Everest.

After a brief conversation with Phinney, Krishna snapped a few more still photos of Babu and Lakpa sitting on the tandem kayak next to the ocean. Before they left, he took a short video of them dunking themselves into the ocean. Then the three of them got back into their kayaks and paddled inland, retracing half of the distance they had already paddled that day, 10 miles back to the town of Kakdwip, where they got a hotel, had a few beers to celebrate the end of their journey, and fell asleep.

They had spent only about thirty minutes on the beach that marked the end of their journey, about half the time they had spent on the summit of Mount Everest. It was the end of what they had dubbed “the ultimate descent”: the first complete, continuous, nonmotorized descent of Mount Everest.

Phinney updated the blog:

27/06/2011 Ultimate Descent Team

Posted on June 27, 2011 by ruppy.kp

01:23:06 PM BAY OF BENGAL, EXPEDITION FINISH big waves and the water is very salty, so happy to be finish!!!!!