Early Plans

I’ve joined up to this blogging malarkey now to keep a tight reign over the young Mr Jackson. I’ve started revising my web 2.0 speak, so I should be ‘lol’-ing and ‘!!!1!’ -ing in no time. For now I’ll stick to our plans, with an overview for now.

As usual, with any river I plan to do, there’s one person who’s been there first. Mark’s guide has been brilliantly useful in getting our heads around what we’ll need to do to get there and come back in one piece. As long as we can follow it….

We’ve had a good few team meetings (mostly in the Eldon) and come up with what might be a foolproof plan, although Ste might be a good enough fool to test it.

So, we fly out on the Thursday to Delhi, courtesy of Virgin Atlantic who are more than happy to take our kayaks since BA refused to take them anymore, and then an overnight stop in Delhi to await a 5/6am ish flight into Leh, at 3500m from sea level. We’ll have a couple of days to rest and become acclimatised to try and avoid HAPE / HACE, though Rob will probably suffer from HAFE.

After last minute preps and some acclimatisation runs on local rivers we’ll head up into the Mountains towards the get in for the Tsarap Chu. This river runs into the Zanskar, and although slightly less committing has the bigger rapids.

After a few days on the Tsarap we should reach Padum, which marks the start of the Zanskar. The Tsarap and the Doda rivers meet here to combine into the Zanskar, which heads off into the famous gorge. A few days on here and we’ll reach the Indus river, which marks our get out and back into Leh.

Sounds simple eh? What could go wrong….