kayakstan.net :: Day 8 - The disappearing truck
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These trucks we're racing around are pretty big. In fact, they're massive and can drive through pretty much anything. So you think it would be hard to lose one. But lose one we have...
The Chuy river is dam released, so we left it until the way back, figuring we wanted to catch the
tribs into lake Issyk-Kul before they dropped off. So more driving.. We made it up to the southwest
corner of the lake by the evening, and drove up a potential tributary to camp. During the night poor
Phil H got attacked by a bout of diarhoerra dihoeria the squits, and was still a
little worse for wear in the morning.
His immortal words, "B*****k, I just sh*t myself" shall make me chuckle for a while to come.
We had a lot of tribs to cover on this side of the lake, and so split up into our two teams to be able to do it faster. James, a cocooned Phil H, Wouter and Martyn went off in one truck to paddle a promising looking gorge section of the trib we had just camped by. Phil C, Rob, Tim, Graham and Dave headed east to search for another likely suspect. The plan was to meet up again in the evening.
I (Rob) write from the persepctive of the 2nd team, now sitting by the side of the road the next morning having temporaily mislaid the other half of our group. We headed east from the camping spot, but soon discovered that the tributaries at this end of the lake are much lower than those on the east corner near Karakol. What makes it harder is that all the local farmers start stealing all the water for irrigation in the lower parts of the valley, so you have to drive up each valley to actually see what water is really in the river. Eventually, we came across the Bapkancock. The track up the valley weaves left and river across the river, often diving away from the river between bridges. It was low volume, but as far as we could gather from the gradient of the track, really steep. Low volume, steep, wooded so bound to be loads of tree hazards? Perversely, that's like a party invitation to some of our team, so on we got.
Luckily, Rob hit the autoboof button on his Jefe before tackling the drop...
It proved to be a cracker. We had just enough time to paddle the interesting 6km steep section, ending in the river getting so steep that it became a 45 degree gradient grade 6 siphon garden. It was great to get out of the truck and on the water, as we'd been driving for the last day and a half. Graham had a interesting 'incident', that we all called a swim although the man himself started bandying around the words 'self-rescue' and 'technical'.
We did say it got steep!
From where we were, it was a good 2 hour drive back to the area we'd tentatively agreed to meet the other truck to camp, and we knew once we got back there, we'd just have to turn round and come all the way back. James had a working mobile phone, and reception round the lake was good, so we sent off a text and camped where we were. At this point early the next morning we're waiting by the road for them to come steaming along from where they ended up camping last night...