T A B L E+T A L K Japan: A reader asks for advice on an upcoming visit in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Olympics bound By Gina Arnold A trip to Japan rekindles a life-shaping obsession (01/19/98) Bad trip By Dawn MacKeen Tale of a flight from hell (01/16/98) Remembering an Everest hero By Suzette Lalime Death of an Everest hero: Anatoli Boukreev (01/16/98) Luzviminda By Richard Sterling A tale of lust and illusion (01/15/98) Nagano: Not ready for prime time By Eric Gower Hundreds of thousands of athletes and fans are about to descend -- so where's the Olympics fever? (01/14/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Wanderlust feature archive - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Your virtual travel agency - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -		BY STEVE VAN BEEK | Tossed down stone steps from an icy, 16,400-foot plateau, the swift river has tumbled to our feet, heaped and holed, churning violently as it folds back on itself, its din horrific. We're calling the rapid "No Exit" -- naming it being the privilege of the first group to run it. It is huge: Class 10, maybe higher. Thirty-thousand cubic feet of water per second -- equal to the Colorado River's flow -- is being constricted by a marble canyon, funneling left at 15 miles an hour into five enormous holes that can munch, even mulch, boats. Little wonder the locals call it a "waterfall" and don't venture near it. Nine days of paddling have brought us through remote gorges of southwest China, down the Lancang River, which downstream neighbors will call the "Mekong" when it reaches them. Our Sino-American team of nine -- officially the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Earth Science Expedition -- includes four kayakers and five oarsmen in two 16-foot Hyside catarafts. We are attempting to descend 100 treacherous miles of one of the world's wildest rivers, pitting plastic and neoprene against stone and furious water. The river's journey began in Tibet. Ours started in Kunming, capital of Yunnan Province. The city gained fame in World War II as the terminus of the Burma Road, which supplied Chiang Kai-shek's army in its effort to keep the Japanese out of British colonial Burma and India. In October 1995, we had put in where the road crossed the Lancang, and descended 110 miles of ferocious rapids to the Manwan Dam, the first ever built on the river. Now, 18 months later, a day's journey south from Kunming has taken us over cobbled roads to a new put-in below the Manwan. We're attempting another first descent, this one south to the Linzhong Bridge. But first, we have to maneuver through this roiling rapid. We walk its edge, scouting a route through the crashing water; it's like standing next to a passing freight train. We yell, barely able to hear each other. Fingers trace potential paths past obstacles. Privately, we're realizing it may be impassable, and ask ourselves if the allure of being No. 1 may have gotten us into trouble. Being first is an elusive concept. To some, it means triumphing over a physical obstacle, reaching a goal ahead of other questers. It is fired by the realization that humankind remembers only the first who succeed. Who was the second man to set foot on the moon? Or follow Lindbergh across the Atlantic? Who was the second to summit Everest, or swim the English Channel? For us, it is more subtle. It has to do with being the first to experience an area as it is, untouched by anyone. We know that our descent is related to stationary objects: the shore, the river bottom. The river has already experienced us, or others like us, flowing in its eternal cycle of evaporation and rainfall. Only it knows what lies beneath, the bed over which it slides. We cannot see beneath its surface. We can only witness surface manifestations of its inner turmoil, guess at the deep rocks that cause it to erupt and foam. When we began this journey, the Lancang seemed a minor challenge. It was April, the dry season, with the cusp of a monsoon still a month away. Winter rainfall had been light. Our greatest worry was: Would the river be big enough to run? At the end of a day's drive from Kunming, we topped the 6,000-foot ridge hemming the Lancang's eastern edge, apprehensive of what we would find in the canyon far below. From the rim, we could see ruffled water. As we zigzagged down the rough road, the picture became more encouraging. On a bluff just above the canyon floor, we watched the Lancang coursing, white-capped, through the canyon. We had a river. Our joy lasted a day. The maps had told us the river's drop averaged seven feet per mile, two feet less than the Grand Canyon's flow and four feet less than that of the 1992 run that included the enormous Dragon's Teeth and Chinese Lunch -- so named because it ate boats and, moments later, was hungry again. Nonetheless, it could still provide plenty of challenges. Once we put in, however, it was a different story. The Lancang gave us little but riffles the first day. And it didn't improve the second. The only excitement came from the sand flies; we were likely the first outsiders they had seen and they feasted with a vengeance. And then it rained -- making life unpleasant for us, but barely raising the river level. Where small tributaries emptied into it, the dark green river was marked by dun patches, soil being carried to the sea. We spent two soggy days drifting down a flat river, watching slanting rain mist mountains like those in a brush painting. Perhaps our maps were wrong; they'd been wrong before. The Russian maps were based on late 1960s surveys, the American maps well before then. The more recent Chinese maps had been enhanced by ground surveys but were drawn for land, not river, use and neglected to note rapids or precipitous drops. It was entirely possible that some rapids had been erased and others created by the waters hurtling down the canyons. Huge walls of water -- perhaps 200,000 cubic feet per second -- had swept through here in earlier years. Scours 40 feet up the canyon walls hinted at their ferocity. Nonetheless, it was clear we were descending only four or five feet per mile, barely perceptible in the rippling water. If the maps weren't wrong, then huge water must be lurking around some distant bend. The uncertainty added spice to the journey. Being first means traveling without road marks, without knowing what lies beyond a boulder, unable to tell if distant thunder is a creek cascading into the river, or a mainstream waterfall plummeting to the rocks. Being first means using your wits to survive. We were discovering other facets of "firstness." Below the dam, we passed beyond the reach of road and, in the evening, nudged the boats onto a virgin beach. It is easier to be first when one travels by river; most sites are otherwise inaccessible, and the Chinese do not use boats on this portion. This beach was walled in by cliffs. Dozens of broken, rotting branches, driftwood jammed between rocks by high water, told us no one had ever built a campfire here. Ours were the first feet to imprint its sands. Such a realization engenders awe, the recognition of an honor bestowed: to experience an area virtually unaltered for eons. How often can one stand in a spot where no other humans have been? Why this was important is difficult to explain. It was like attending the birth of the earth, a link with primordial creation, untrammeled by millennia of human impact. Early on the second day, we crossed wakes with the first Chinese boats we had seen, bulky wooden vessels with high gunwales, defense against tall waves. Late in the afternoon, while setting up camp, we were hailed by a pair of boatmen. Their craft, a long bamboo raft, worked the waters high above the rapids, ferrying passengers and goods to the opposite shore. I boarded one to see how it negotiated the fast-flowing water. One man walked along the shore, hunched over by a long line, towing the boat against a strong current. The second man pushed a bamboo pole against the shore to keep the bow pointed upriver. The pair tugged the raft nearly half a mile upriver, until they were sure the current wouldn't pull it far downstream before it reached the other side, 200 yards away. Cross-river propulsion came from two "hoes," wide slabs of wood bound to bamboo poles. Once they pushed off, the crew began "hoeing" the water rapidly, "ferry angling" the bow 45 degrees to the river, gradually working their way across without being swept downstream. Few ferrymen work as hard. These were lathered in sweat by the time they reached the far bank, directly across from their starting point. For us, the discovery of a new way to travel provided a wider understanding of how remote river people perceive the world, how they tackle the same challenges that confront us, despite the difference in technology. The third day brought more pouring rain and ruffled water. Dark clouds hampered visibility, ending the day around 4 p.m. near a banana grove. Banana trees are a sure sign of habitation since, like palms, they seldom grow in the wild. The grove held the remains of a house: posts, beams and a leaky roof of rotting thatch. We huddled in the cold, waiting for the rain to break. Eventually, the sky cleared, the sun came out. We erected tents on a soggy, sandy slope. As we worked, we became aware of tiny figures hiding in the brush. Gradually, they ventured to the edge of the wide beach to watch us. These brave pioneers were augmented by the arrival of more and more children, flowing down the hillside from a village, previously obscured by rain clouds. They were the shyest children we'd ever seen. The moment we spoke to them or pointed a camera their direction, they fled. Eventually they realized that two of our group -- Ma Da, from the Academy, and Kym Gentry, our linguist -- spoke Mandarin, and they edged closer. Thousands of miles from Beijing, they spoke a barely discernible dialect. Soon, word of our arrival filtered up the hill to their village, Sha-ba, and equally shy adults descended on us. It has become almost axiomatic in stories of remote regions to read, "We were the first white people they had ever seen." It is a lame cliché, but in this instance, true. They told us we were the first outsiders, white or Chinese, they had met. It revealed another wonderful aspect of "firstness": to meet people untouched by the outside world, living as they have been for centuries. We watched their encounter with a new world. Once they deduced that we weren't a threat, however strange we looked in lifejackets, helmets and sprayskirts, they poked tentatively at the plastic of the kayaks, the neoprene of the catarafts. They watched us cook on a low, rectangular metal box that hissed blue flames. They ran their hands over the gleaming raft frames, the strange pyramids in which we slept, the rubber coatings on the dry bags, whispering their discoveries to each other. N E X T+P A G E+| Carving your name on the planet - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - PHOTOS BY STEVE VAN BEEK