Flying Off Everest (19 page)

In an interview with the
Nepali Times,
Babu later admitted in question form, “If [Susmita] had listened to me and given up kayaking, if we hadn’t had a divorce, then how would my wife have become a champion?” He encouraged other Nepali women to take Susmita as an example and “follow their dreams.”

Kayaking had torn Babu and Susmita apart, but it also eventually brought them together—as something more like equals. But not quite equals. Three years later, Babu told Susmita he was going to climb Everest with Lakpa, fly off of the summit, and paddle to the ocean. He wasn’t asking. When Susmita told him she didn’t want him to go, he went anyway, leaving her behind with Niraj and enough money to get by for a few months while he was away.

Babu and Lakpa slept in late the day after they swam Jaws and Dead Man’s. It was raining. After packing up camp, they got back in the kayak and paddled just over 9 miles of easy, relatively flat, fast-moving water before Lakpa saw the horizon line drop off in front of him again. A loud, distant roaring echoed in his ears. Babu told him it was a Class III+/IV- rapid named Rhino Rock, after a large horn-shaped boulder sticking up in the middle of the river near the entrance of the rapid, which they would try to veer to the right of.

Lakpa still didn’t know how to turn the boat. He could only paddle forward.

“I felt a little more confident,” Lakpa says, recalling the moments before dropping into Rhino Rock, which at that level was a fairly sizeable, although slightly smaller, wave train than Jaws. “It didn’t feel like I was about to die. Because I knew I had two options: one is life jacket, the other is Krishna. When I flip, I realized I wouldn’t die.”

He was able to test his theory a few seconds later when, again, he and Babu capsized in the middle of the rapid, with Shri Hari filming the carnage from shore. Lakpa pulled his skirt and looked for Krishna, who this time was close behind him. Babu, who again was unsuccessful at rolling the tandem kayak filled with water, swam himself to shore.

“The end of the rapid is very flat water, so it was an easy rescue,” Krishna says.

Easy rescue or not, Lakpa was now tired and cold after swimming two major rapids in a row. He refused to get back in the kayak with Babu.

This presented a problem for Shri Hari, who was supposed to be filming them. He couldn’t make a video of them paddling a tandem kayak down the Sun Kosi if Lakpa wasn’t in the boat. But Lakpa insisted on switching over to the raft, especially after learning that the next 5 miles were filled with six solid Class IV rapids—a particularly steep and challenging section of the river known as the Jungle Corridor. So Shri Hari, who had paddled a solo kayak a few times before years earlier on much easier whitewater, attached a GoPro to the bow and stern of the tandem, donned a PFD and helmet, picked up Lakpa’s paddle, and climbed into the kayak along with Babu. If he couldn’t film Lakpa in the kayak, he would film somebody in the kayak. And that somebody had to be him.

Krishna spent the rest of the day pulling Shri Hari and Babu out of the water. “Many, many times they went swimming,” he says, having lost count of exactly how many times they capsized. They flipped on most of the six major named rapids in the Jungle Corridor.

Babu, who hadn’t swam in years paddling in solo boats, couldn’t quite seem to steer or even roll a tandem with an inexperienced paddler sitting in the front. But they were making headway downstream, even if it was slow and not always in the boat.

They reached the end of the Jungle Corridor at dusk and set up camp on a sandy beach. The rain had stopped. Slightly rested from his swim-free raft ride that day, Lakpa agreed to get back in the kayak and run the final rapid before the river flattened out above Chatra, their take-out, the next morning. This way Shri Hari could hopefully get at least one carnage-free shot of the both of them in the tandem before he went back to Kathmandu the next day.

The final rapid on the Sun Kosi is located just before the confluence of the Arun and Tamur, before it flattens out wide and fat and slow on the plains on the border with India. It begins with a Class III wave train and ends in a large, nearly river-wide recirculating hole called “Big Dipper.” With the hole at the bottom, it’s a solid Class IV. It’s known for flipping and holding rafts and kayaks.

Of course, that next morning, Babu and Lakpa flipped in the hole and swam, their boat tossing itself end over end. They both flushed downstream, along with their boat. Krishna scrambled to catch up with Lakpa and pulled him to shore. “It’s a very long rapid,” Krishna explains. “So it was hard to catch him.” By the time he did, Babu and Lakpa had lost both of their paddles.

They didn’t have any spares.

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.”