The Alaknanda is the primary source of the biggest river in India, the Ganges. Eight members of the Czech expedition team traveled there with three cars from Europe to India.

The journey was ten thousand kilometers each way through Turkey, Iran and Pakistan to the Himalayas. We came to finish a story of two different expeditions from past. First there was the Czech expedition “Ganges 77” but they were not successful, as on the first day on the water the two best paddlers were drowned.

The second expedition was from New Zealand called “From the Ocean to the Sky”, where Sir Edmund Hillary was in jet boats going upstream but they had to stop due to huge rapids 150 km before they had planned.

Our mission was to take seven weeks and we spent 14 days on the water. Our team of four paddlers did the first 180km’s of this river; it was totally awesome whitewater. The challenges ranged from the source, where the flow wasn’t more than 50 cubic`s but super steep, to the last days, when we were fighting with more than 1000 cubics.

We finally paddled all this section successfully and built a proper memorial at the scene of the accident for the two dead paddlers from the 1977 expedition.

Expedition Alaknanda  - background to the mission.

After three years the boaters who descended the source and the upper streams of the Ganges in July 2003, returned to India again.

This time they wanted to visit the second source of the Ganges called the Alakananda.

The descent of the Alakananda’s source and its upper streams was attempted by a team which had huge experience, gathered from time paddling the Ganges and around the world.

In the case of such an expedition it’s not only the feat itself but that the team must totally pull together from the human relationships point of view.

In the extreme conditions in which the expedition members were immersed, they must know each other perfectly and completely trust each other.

That’s why the core of the team is a group of four who have twice taken part in big expeditions.

The first one was on the Ganges; the second one was to Jamaica, the Jamaica 2004 expedition.

The team members were: Peter Kaspar, Filip Jancar, Tomas Minarik, Jana Blahout, Honza Lasko from Pardubice and photographer Petr Novak.

The expedition set itself several targets which they achieved. The main one of course was the descent of the river. However the other targets didn’t fall short of this main ambition and they are historically tied to the background of the group.

When the boaters had returned from the expedition in July 2003, they met Jaromir Stetina and Frantisek Slama in Czech TV studios.

Jaromir and Frantisek were very connected with the Ganges and as Petr Kaspar writes:

“We sat in the hallway and were all talking about our experiences. Franta had with him a notebook with the cuttings from newspaper articles and a book written by Sir Edmund Hillary called ”From the ocean to the sky” which was translated into Czech and he had written an epilogue to it.

This was the first time we got to know about their expedition to the Ganges in 1977 and about Jirka and Vasek who drowned there”.

The expedition in 1977 led by J Stetina served as an inspirational source for the new trip. Getting to the river was an adventure in its own right, as well as getting there by car.

Says Kaspar: “We want to go the long way, about 10,000 km, to get to know the environment which our predecessors traveled through and to compare their photographs and films with ours. And also to find out what has changed through almost 30 years and what remains the same“.

”We can finally complete the film about this controversial dam. We want to find out how the construction finished. We have unique and complete documented material, showing the environment before the flooding. We want to find out how the people look upon the dam today. To express the bad sides but on the other hand, to say what this work brought to the people”.

These ambitious plans have been spinning around in the expeditioner’s heads from the moment when they met Stetina and Slama but also another personality entered into the game namely Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man who climbed Mt. Everest.

What connects this man with the boaters and the Ganges?

We have already noted Hillary’s book “From The Ocean To The Sky”, which describes one of Hillary’s distinguished exploit. In the same year as Stetina, Hillary set out with three jet boats on a long journey from the shores of the Indian Ocean to the Ganges springs.

Unfortunately Hillary’s boats were stopped by a giant cataract before Johsimato, so that even he did not reach the springs up river. In spite of this, his feat belongs with other admirable ones.

Alakananda 2006 expedition symbolically connects three named expeditions all of who set out for the sacred Ganges.

It was not the first and will not be the last but with its objective was unique.

Have a good day ……… Honza and the WW8 expedition group”.