Flying Off Everest (21 page)

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:

Two days later, she updated it again:

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.