Looking Back on an Expedition

Andy Maser running probe on the Zongo River

When you’re still out of the country, it’s tough to visualize an expedition as a whole.  I can look back on all of the experiences, think back to all the interviews and flip through photos, but it’s not easy to pull all the pieces together into a story until you get home and give it some time to brew.  I’ve been sitting at my desk for about a week writing reports for funders and sponsors, running through the events over and over again, and it’s all just beginning to make sense.  Though we’ve been on a pretty epic ride lately, our most recent expedition to Bolivia took some turns we definitely weren’t expecting and served up some interesting “firsts.”  I’m going to save most of the juicy details for later, but here’s a quick glimpse into my post-expedition reflections.

So here’s the gist of the project:  La Paz and the surrounding areas depend on tropical glaciers for nearly all of their water.  Dry season is more than half the year, and there isn’t much rain collection.  In the last 20 years though, the natural cycle of these glaciers has gotten thrown completely out of whack and now they are melting very quickly””so quickly that one has already completely disappeared.  And it’s getting exponentially worse, because as they melt more, they melt faster.  So our mission was to explore the high elevation glaciers, the whitewater rivers that flow from them and the cultures that depend on the water for survival.  An international team of scientists that we met with developed supply and demand curves for water based on a number of factors, and 2009 is the first year when the supply curve will drop below the demand curve.  We were working with a very interesting local hydrologist, a spunky 73 year old mountaineer, the National Geographic Channel, some really supportive sponsors and our favorite eco/adventure rag, Wend Magazine.

Alfredo Mantinez, 73, in front of the peak he first climbed at 18.

But back to the events”¦

This was the first expedition were we didn’t have anything really scary happen.  In PNG, two paddlers ended up in major life-threatening situations””on the same day.  In China, we ended up in Tibet illegally during the conflict of March/April 2008.  In Congo, we got pinned down by rebels with machine guns.  In comparison to all that, Bolivia was chill.  We kept it tight on the water and, fortunately, the political scene was exceptionally stable.

This was the first expedition where things didn’t go exactly according to the plan.  I’m going to keep these details fuzzy, but suffice it to say that I was nervous about the fate of the project at times.  No matter how well you plan, sometimes you’ve got greater forces working against you.  And these greater forces like to hang out in remote, difficult to reach places that take a long time to get to!  If you need to find horses to help you get to said places, the more likely you are to encounter the “greater forces!”

This was the first time when an expedition member stopped and said, “This is too much, I’m not going on anymore.”  It is really interesting to see how perception of risk changes as lifestyle factors change.  I’d never witnessed someone experiencing the exact moment when (risky) exploration simply wasn’t worth it anymore.

This was the first expedition where we felt comfortable communicating in the local language!  Traveling in a Spanish-speaking country was really fun and made interviews so much easier.  Being able to walk up to a group of people and spark up a conversation (without a translator) was pretty awesome and led to some great material.  This makes me really want to learn French.

This was our first project on climate change.  Rivers in Demand, our current series of expeditions, is all about exploring and documenting environments on the brink of change, but this project was a little bit more intense than the rest.  We’re going to produce a few projects on the story, but the long and short of it is that the environmental situation in Bolivia is scary””scarier than any other that we’ve investigated.  Bolivia has big problems coming fast because of climate change, and there will be major effects on the population.  We might see La Paz dry up in the decades to come if the international community does not step in and provide workable solutions, because Bolivia just doesn’t have what it needs to do the job itself.  The timelines for this stuff are scary and based on lots of scientific evidence.  They also unfortunately tend to accelerate.

I’m definitely glad to be working on a climate change project in the critical months leading up to Copenhagen.  Investigating a culture on the brink of climate-change-caused environmental disaster, without the means to adapt, really helped me internalize the importance of immediate global initiatives.  It’s easy to feel disconnected from the problem when you live in a society that has the resources to temporarily adapt to the changes, but really eye-opening to spend time in a culture that doesn’t, knows there’s a major problem and knows that they can’t adapt.