The last of the great adventures?

In which the difference between textbook and reality is illustrated

In my school geography textbook, there was a sentence "In Tibet, where it originates, the Brahmaputra is called the Tsangpo".

The Yarlung Tsangpo, often referred to as the highest river in the world, originates at Mount Kailash -- holy to Hindus, Jains and Buddhists. It flows East along the Tibetan plateau, at an average elevation of 13,000 ft, gathering runoff from the Northern Himalayas. 1700 kilometers later, near the Eastern edge of the Himalayas, this mighty river disappears. Just downstream of a little village called Gyala, the Tsangpo roars into a narrow canyon between the 24000 ft+ peaks of Namcha Barwa and Gyala Pelri, whose summits are separated by just 13 miles. Through the era of the great British led adventures, the subsequent fate of the Tsangpo was unknown. Popular theory had it that it emerges from the Himalayas, hundreds of miles away, as the Irrawady - the only major river in the vicinity that emerges from the Himalayas flowing east.

The Brahmaputra, on the other hand, emerges from the Himalayas as the Dihang in Arunachal Pradesh. Within the space of 35 kms, it is joined by two more major rivers, the Dibang and the Lohit. From this point, the river becomes very wide - as much as 10km in places - and proceeds in stately fashion across Assam and into Bangladesh. About the origins of this great river, though, very little was known. It emerges from the Himalayan canyonlands fully formed, flowing West at nearly sea level.

In the 1870s, British colonial explorers tried to solve the mystery of the origin of the Brahmaputra. They were, however, barred from the lower end of the canyon by hostile tribes in Arunachal Pradesh and from the upper end by Tibet's closed border. Stymied, they hired Tibetan speaking Indians to survey the river and prove the connection between the Tsangpo and the Brahmaputra. The most famous of these agents was Kintup, a tailor from Sikkim. His task was to make his way to the upper end of the gorge, where the Tsangpo disappears, and launch 500 marked logs into the river. Watchers posted downstream on the banks of the Brahmaputra would then be able to settle the mystery once and for all. However, Kintup was captured and sold into slavery on his journey and only escaped after a year of captivity. Even so, he did fulfill his end of the bargain. Alas, his marked logs must have floated all the way to the Bay of Bengal, as the watchers were long gone.

Between 1885, the date of Kintup’s mission, and 1913, the Tsangpo - Brahmaputra connection was a topic of speculation far and wide. Then, in 1913, the borders of Tibet were opened. British officers Frederick Bailey and Henry Morshead completed a journey up the canyon, following the river's general course but making significant detours due to the difficulty of the terrain. With this expedition, all debate about the actual course and identity of river was put to rest. The Tsangpo and the Brahmaputra were indeed one.

But how could such a great river lose more than 10,000 feet in altitude and change its direction of flow so completely in the space of less than 200 miles? Somewhere in that gorge, speculation went, must be a waterfall to rival the Niagara and Victoria Falls. And so was born the legend of the Tsangpo Gorge - unexplored territory that no man had seen before, a place where the world's greatest waterfall still waited to be discovered. The story of this gorge is thought to have inspired James Hilton's Shangri-La in 1935.

In 1924, a botanist by name of Frank Kingdon-Ward led an expedition that not only solved the riddle of the Tsangpo Gorge, but also reduced the unexplored part of the Gorge to a section about 10 miles long. It was proven that the river’s descent is not by means of a great waterfall, but by a near-constant series of violent rapids. For the next 70 years, the Tsangpo gorge lay largely undisturbed. In the 1990s, with the rise of whitewater paddling as a recreational sport, there was a resurgence of interest in this "Everest of river running".

In 1993, a Japanese expedition put in to the Tsangpo, but quickly withdrew after losing a team-mate to the river. In 1998, an expedition funded by the National Geographic Society attempted to run the gorge, only to lose a team-mate, Doug Gordon. Finally, in 2002, an expedition funded by Outside magazine successfully ran the Upper Gorge. Even they, though, quickly and wisely gave up on their original plan of running the entire gorge. The Lower Gorge, they declared, is unrunnable. This team finally came away with a special prize - a photograph of Hidden Falls, the mythic 100 foot waterfall in the heart of the gorge - after their expert mountaineer Andrew Sheppard rappelled down to stand at the edge of it. Read all about this expedition here and see the photograph of a lifetime here.

And so, as my textbook said long ago, "In Tibet, the Brahmaputra is called the Tsangpo".