Tibet 2007
2 - Reting Tsangpo:
The next morning we learnt several lessons as we packed up the truck and headed out of town. The first thing we learnt was that, once you have loaded a lot of very bulky and old fashioned camping gear into the back of your ex-unicef double cab pickup, then complimented it with a large amount of paddling gear and wrapped a tarpaulin over the top 
its not as easy as you might hope to load boats on top. After several different attempts we thought we had arrived at a solid working arrangement…
After heading out of town for a while we also learnt a second lesson. Just because they live there, and can speak to the locals, and supposedly know where they are going - it isn't always a good idea to just let the guide or the driver choose the rout without consultation. We didn't fully appreciate this fact until, having left around 9 in the morning, it came to be early evening and we were still driving to somewhere we had been told was about 5 hours drive away. It was also about that point that Chris's boat fell off the back of the truck and we learnt that our careful boat loading arrangement was going to need some revision.
Then next day, having decided on the drive up that the river below didn't look too exciting, we headed up the river with the plan of paddling down to our campsite. However, after a couple of kilometres our path up the river was blocked by a set ropes across the road. The ropes were anchoring a fairly large orange dong-feng lorry to some very frail looking bushes. On first inspection we assumed the small crowd of people and two other lorries were working on some plan to extract the falling lorry. However, on getting out and wandering up it turned out that what they were doing was digging away at bits of the hillside, and building up other bits, so that they could simply bypass the ropes holding up the other lorry. It was a pretty slow and slightly bizarre approach to the problem - but one that I've found is pretty common in Himalayan road problems. The attitude generally is not so much 'how can we solve the problem' as 'how can I get my car / lorry through as quickly as possible'. So we stood around for a while whilst Chris had is arm hair stroked by some local guys who had rocked up on their motorbikes and decided to stay and watch. As the slow bypass construction continued the arm hair stroking proceeded into chest hair stroking and there were indications that it could have gone even further but Chris decided that he was going to stop it at that point.
After a while it turned out that our driver had been considering the problem from a 'what's best for us perspective' too. It turned out that by lifting one of the ropes holding the dangling lorry and temporarily untying one of the others (which in truth was attached to such a small thorn bush it was unlikely to be doing any good anyway) we could drive through, thus bypassing the bypass construction.
So we got on the first river of our trip 'proper'. The Reting-Tsangpo. It was reasonably big volume, fairly blue, had some nice but not especially hard rapids and a few fun waves. We got back to the campsite reasonable early, carried our boats up the bank. And were exhausted 
- clearly still not yet as acclimatised to paddling at 4000m as we had hoped we were. We laid our kit out in the sun, ate the biscuits we hadn't eaten for lunch then, whilst Rich had a doze as he was feeling the altitude quite badly, Chris and I went to investigate a tributary which had been recommend to us. It looked OK, but a little small and scrapy so as we headed back we decided to leave it and move on the next day. In terms of time this probably suited the plan better as every day we were quicker over the first week or so of paddling on rivers we had info about left more time for exploring the un-paddled sections we were planning to head to later on.
After only a minor discussion with the driver and guide we decided to drive out of the valley along the route we chose rather than going back the way we came (as they still preferred). The road was surprisingly good for one which didn't even feature on the map other than being drawn on with biro in Lhasa. Towards the top of the pass into the next valley the reason for the quality of the road became apparent as a swath of mine workings began to open out in front of us. There was quite a mess up the top of the valley 'shit - look this, fucking Chinese' as Yeshi put it.
A word about Yeshi (pronounced Ish-y). As our guide he was a genuinely awesome guy. About 16 years ago (which I guess would have made him about 17), without any papers he walked through the Himalayas into Nepal - moving only at night to avoid the Chinese military and loosing all his toes to frostbite in the process. He then spent most of the next 12 years in India studying Buddhism at several schools supported by the Dali Lama. Eventually he decided to return home, hitched up through Nepal and, after spending some time in Kathmandu, up to the 'friendship bridge' which crosses the Bhote-Khosi at the border of Nepal and Tibet. He talked Nepali to the border guards (Nepalese are allowed across the bridge as far as Chinese immigration) and generally pushed through with a crowd. You can tell from the way he talked about it the he was pretty nervous about the whole thing (as well you might be crossing an international border into a country you shouldn't have left and for which you could well be locked up!). Following that he's found time to become a raft guide on the Yangtze river, get a passport and spend six months travelling round America, generally spend time guiding river trips in Tibet and China and study photography with an ex-photographer from the National Geographic! He speaks and 4 or 5 Tibetan dialects, several Madarin dialects, Hindi, Nepali and English. And with an awesome sense of humour (though by the end of the trip we came to trust pretty much nothing that he told us - not of his life story, more of the every day things like 'sorry no dinner', or 'no kayaking here', or 'this woman says that…' and 'I told her that you…' - the last two being the probably the most common statements.)