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Tsangpo Expedition
Liquid Thunder (cont.)
Trouble in Shangri-La


	The new porters shoulder the load into the village of Tsachu (Charlie Munsey)

EIGHTEEN DAYS AFTER THE PUT-IN at Pe, and after four days of non-stop portaging, the exhausted company straggled out of the jungle of the Lower Gorge and into the village of Gogden, population about 150. Beyond the village lay the Tsangpo, in a riven chasm too deep to show its waters, and across the gorge was a sloping wall of terraced fields and scattered houses beneath snowy peaks.

The expedition members were invited into several houses, and in the dimness of smoke-blackened rooms with wide-plank floors everyone ate fresh popcorn and drank bowl after bowl of clarified grain liquor sloshed out of plastic gas cans. The open hearths glowed red, the bronze prayer wheels beside them gleamed, and the rafters were hung with pig stomachs packed with yak butter. The kayakers mimed to their baffled Mönpa hosts. Unlike the farmers of Pe and the Upper Gorge, the Mönpa are hunters—one of the few Buddhist hunting cultures on earth. They served yak-butter tea to cut the liquor, and by the time we were led into a sloping cow pasture to set up camp, some of us couldn't untie our shoes.

The next day Mike Abbott, Willie Kern, and Dustin Knapp hiked down into the Lower Gorge to take stock of the river and returned to report a startling transformation: the turquoise current, swelled by the water of the Po Tsangpo, flowed through a 300-foot-high

The rocky banks from the satellite maps were gone. The river now a barren trough of steep walls lined with a stupefying scar.

bedrock scour on either side. The rocky banks we'd seen in the satellite photographs were gone. The river was now a barren trough of steep walls lined with a stupefying scar, the track of a cataclysm. In June 2000, only a month after Space Imaging's satellite had passed overhead, a great mud dam that had been formed by a landslide on the Yigong, a tributary of the Po Tsangpo, had burst. Ken Storm and the team had heard rumors about this flash flood, but nothing had given them an inkling of the scale of transformation on the Lower Gorge.

The team received another unwelcome surprise when the Gogden elders informed Lindgren that the expedition was subject to an ancient Tibetan tradition known as ula. Under the rule, they said, traveling parties are obliged to change porters at every village. They politely said they wouldn't let the expedition move until Lindgren and Allardice relented, but there was a steely threat of physical intimidation behind the ultimatum. The porters from Pe, though, figured they had been contracted to accompany the expedition all the way through to the end of the trip and were expecting to be paid in full regardless.

There was an afternoon of meetings at one end of a pasture, some of the head porters sitting in a tight circle in feverish negotiations with Allardice and Lindgren. Finally the younger porters got impatient, pushed aside the elders, and demanded to be paid right away.



	Hostile territory: The porters riot in Gogden Village (Charlie Munsey)

Allardice said, "Police," and made a handcuff motion. Dustin Lindgren pointed at faces and gestured as if to write down their names. Furious shouts went up. When translator Tsawong took out his porter book to look up the names of ringleaders, the hotheads lost it and the whole crowd surged forward. Punches flew, and everybody was yelling. The porters, most of them armed with knives and machetes, had become a mob.

Desperate to head off disaster, Lindgren got on the satellite phone and called the Chinese liaison who had obtained our permits and arranged our overland travel. "Our lives are in danger here," he said. "They're threatening our lives." He asked the liaison to speak to one of the headmen from Pe, and the two talked for quite a while, with the phone cutting out several times.

It was a low point for Lindgren. The portage had taken its toll, he was exhausted, he'd lost weight. Now this.

Allardice was measured. "Scott, is it worth it, keeping up this talking?"

Lindgren made the decision. "Right now, we have no option except to pay them what they want," he said.

So he paid, $9,000 more than the original bargain. With a bitter taste he hired 38 new porters from Gogden, and the expedition moved on.

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