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>Author: By Ethan Gilsdorf, Globe Correspondent
Date: 09/21/2003 Page: M5 Section: Travel Book Review
>Lost In Mongolia: Rafting the World's Last Unchallenged River\ By Colin
Angus Broadway, 288 pp., illustrated, $12.95
Go ahead, name the five longest rivers, in order.
First two, no-brainers: the Nile, the Amazon. Advanced geography fans
might guess the Yangtze next. Fourth, the Mississippi-Missouri. And then?
The Yenisey.
The what?
Colin Angus asked himself the same question. A veteran of the second successful
expedition to raft the entire length of the Amazon (entertainingly told
in his 2001 book, "Amazon Extreme"), Angus couldn't wait to be a pioneer.
The virgin Yenisey remained to be conquered.
The trip he envisioned, like his Amazon adventure, was to follow the entire
river, from its nascent dribble on a peak called Otgon Tenger in the Hangayn
Mountains of Mongolia, then across Russia and Siberia, and finally to
its mouth some 3,400 miles away in the Arctic Circle. The point was to
travel the Yenisey under the power of his crew: no motors. They paddled
a rubber raft and kayak for roughly the first quarter, then rowed a wooden
dory with two massive oars for the rest. Adding to the challenge, the
team had a limited window. Eight months of the year, the river is jammed
with ice.
"Lost in Mongolia: Rafting the World's Last Unchallenged River" tells
of Angus's five-month ordeal. It's a misleading title, though, since he
does not say if other top rivers like China's Huang He, Russia's Ob-Irtysh,
Amur, and Lena, Southeast Asia's Mekong, or Central Africa's Zaire/Congo
have been "challenged." Besides, a quick Google check reveals no unanimity
on the question of the top 10 waterways. (Technically, for the Yenisey
to even make the top five, it needs to be thrown into the Yenisey-Angara
river system.)
Record-book debates aside, the journey is remarkable. Surely the most
harrowing episode is Angus's separation from his two teammates. While
still in Mongolia, the raft capsizes, spilling their belongings into the
river. Angus paddles off in a kayak to retrieve a bag containing their
documentary film footage. Without food, clothing, bedding, or sun protection,
he lives by his own wits for 12 days.
When he meets Mongolian peasants living in tepee-like huts called gers,
Angus is reduced to pantomime and scribbling Neanderthal-like cartoons
to describe his mishap. Details like this - or how, later, the temporarily
coed crew takes care of personal hygiene in an 18-foot wooden boat with
no toilet - amusingly satisfy our curiosity to know the nuts and bolts
of this expedition.
But in recounting his tale, Angus does not have the help of Ian Mulgrew
(the Vancouver Sun reporter who assisted him with his last book). On its
own, Angus's prose can be spare and matter-of-fact - reading more like
"dear diary" than a literary work capable of penetrating insight. Upon
being awarded a grant to finance the trip, he resorts to cliches: "I felt
as if I were dreaming. All those sleepless nights. . . ." In striving
to analyze his drive for adventure, Angus struggles with such flat insights
as, "the more challenging the situations you put yourself in, the higher
you set your goals, the more you will get out of life."
That is unfortunate, because "Amazon Extreme" had set a high standard,
offering in-depth character sketches of the team members, crisp exchanges
of dialogue, and at times illuminating historical background. Without
Mulgrew, Angus's near daily entries - covering the arrival in China on
April 20, 2001, and the eventual destination deep in the Arctic Circle's
Kara Sea on Sept. 20 - advance the narrative efficiently. But the opportunity
to go beyond "what we did on the river today" is frequently squandered.
For every striking image the author conjures, such as, "When the last
iridescent streaks of day had been wrung from the sky," the reader must
suffer a mundane "The night had seemed endless" observation. A firmer
editorial hand could have seen the author through these stylistic lapses.
That "Lost in Mongolia" eventually succeeds as stripped-down armchair
adventure is less a testament to the author's writerly gifts than to his
story and spirit. In spite, or perhaps because of, adversity, Angus's
crew attracts hospitality. In a Bratsk Sea harbor town, they meet a mafia
boss named Vladimir. Prohibited from leaving Russia, he touchingly befriends
the quartet, snapping his fingers to lavish them with food and entertainment.
After one such feast, Angus asks what his crew can do in return:
"His levity vanishing, he soberly looked at the floor and said, `What
I would really like, you can't give me.' There was silence.
`I want to travel the world, but I can't. . . . Your company is the only
gift I need. You are my window to the outside world.' "
In a day of heightened suspicion of foreigners and unfamiliar cultures,
"Lost in Mongolia" instructs us that you are never truly "lost" among
generosity and camaraderie - which, Angus's adventure proves, happily
thrive in the most far-flung places.
Ethan Gilsdorf is a writer and poet who lives in Paris.
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