Mekong background ……

The Mekong River is the world's 10th longest river and has great influences upon nature and societies of the Indo-china Peninsula. The name "MEKONG" originate in Thai language, Mae Nam Khong and the source of the Mekong River is in the Tibetan mountains and is called Dza Chu River, the River of Rock.

“Making it to the Mekong River was insane.

We had an incredible drive up through some really high passes and ventured deep into some Tibetan regions. It was about a 18 hour drive from our “base” in the small town of Lijiang. The mountains and surrounding areas were covered with prayer flags and small monasteries.

The drive in itself was a heck of a trip. We stayed in a small Tibetan town the first night, renamed recently Shangri-La for tourism reasons (Chinese government is all about the money) and had some incredible traditional food, as well as dancing in town square with the locals. The next day we headed for the put-in.

After some more time spent on the freaking CRAZY roads we made it. I think we only almost drove right off the dang road about 5 times. The roads are literally just chipped out of the sides of giant Himalayan mountains. Truly crazy.

It was really good to make it to the put-in safely. We had scouted some rapids from way up on the road and the rapids looked pretty cool with some big easily avoidable holes and some cool waves scattered all around. Nothing too big.

We paddled up to the first big rapid we scouted and hopped out to take a look from river level. WOW, way bigger up close for sure. The cool waves kinda scattered in there but there were also behemoth monsters and the holes were sucking birds out of the sky.

Not really but it was sick and was a lot bigger than it looked from the road. The first day was the biggest rapids of the whole trip.

We paddled some really heinous stuff. The last big rapid of the day was real full on. The whole river channelled down to about a 50 foot wide channel and had some impressively large waves and holes in it.

Once again it looked big from the banks but once I dropped in it was way, way bigger. There was a burly big hole at the bottom and man I got crushed in that  bad boy, as did some other folks in the group.

Some lucky ones punched the first wave as it greened out and the rest of us had a big smack from a giant breaking wave and as a result got pushed further middle than we wanted and went right into the chowder pot.

Just a bit more boogie rapids until we made it to camp. We paddled around a bend and there was a small Buddhist monastery perched on a hill with prayer flags seriously covering the hill side.

When we continued around the bend, we rounded the point and had an entire village sitting on the banks smiling and waving to us. It was a great way to paddle into the first camp of the trip. We met up with our rafts that night.Right out of camp the next morning we had a killer good play wave.

It was about 5 feet tall with a sick shoulder on the side perfect for warming up on the river and was great for getting back into it.

Blunts and Pan-Ams were the name of the game that day. It was a bouncy sucker and we had a good short session on it before we had to head downstream to the next camp.

The rest of the Mekong was filled with impressive gorge walls and snow capped mountains scattered all along the landscape. The Buddhist and Tibetan culture offered some impressively colourful views of the Mekong area of the Yunnan Province.

We had a great layover day, mostly due to the fact that the local authorities told us we were no longer allowed to paddle on the river past their village.

We hung out at camp for the 5th day, and as things were being sorted out with the Chinese government we hiked up to a tiny little village and through many terraced hill sides and got to take photos of the whole river landscape and the villagers farming away on their land.

After the day started to wind down, we were told to paddle about 3 kilometres downstream the next day to take out, which cut our trip just a little short but we were still able to experience the entire Moon Gorge and didn’t miss out on any sweet waves or huge rapids.

We had a 14 hour drive to get back to Lijiang after a long cold de-rigging of all the rafts and trip and some more sketch roads and one super late night we made it back for a few days off before we headed up to surf the big water waves of the Salween river on the border of Burma. All in all, a hell of a trip, regards Sam”.