Thursday, 22 August 2013

Upper Indus

After doing the Zanskar, we did a 2 day trip on the upper Indus.  The Indus is obviously a pretty cool river, starting on the Tibetan plateau in China/Tibet, then flowing into and through India where it gains a lot of flow in the Ladakh region, a lot of which comes from the Zanskar, and then continuing its mission into Pakistan.  

This section of whitewater was my favorite so far in India.  It was basically bigish water class Iv and IV+, which let us bomb through some fun and pretty big rapids in an incredible canyon.  We met up with whitewater legend Polly Green the day before, who has been working on a filiming project in Leh.  She is an amazing boater and led us through all these rapids for both days.  We had a great camp on a beach on the side of the river.  All in all we floated about 30 miles or so from just above the Army Base in Kiari to Upshi.  



A big load of boats ready to go play, leaving the Oriental Guest House.  If you are ever in Leh, definitely stay here, great family and staff - so genuine, helpful and friendly, great food, 


Oriental Garden, a lot of food comes from this little Shangri La every day for the meals cooked from scratch



Traffic in Leh


Building a Buddhist temple, fun to watch.  Check out the scaffolding setup.  This is part of the facility where we saw the Dalai Lama speak to about 10,000 Ladahki's and Tibetan refugees later in the week. 


Cool writing all over the place on the rocks


Big ole monastery


The equipment is not exactly the newest


Beautiful place for a farming community, check out these granite gorges


Many hands make light work, and the ladder is functional but scary


Wow


Misty clouds in the desert, it looks surreal


Polly floating into a cool bridge


More cool writing, how did they get there?




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