www.moderntravelermagazine.com
By Richard Bangs
Photographs by Laura Hubber
“The river…fell in one sheet of water, without any interval, above half an English mile in breadth, with a force and a noise that was truly terrible, and which stunned and made me, for a time, perfectly dizzy… It was a most magnificent sight, that ages, added to the greatest length of human life, would not deface or eradicate from my memory.”
This is how the Scottish explorer, James Bruce, in his search for the source of the Nile in 1770, described the 150-foot- high Tissisat Falls in Ethiopia. Yet when I scrambled to this magnificence last year, the immense cascade was gone, 90 percent diverted into a power scheme built by Chinese and Serbian contractors, erected without knowledge or critique from the rest of the world.
Throughout my travels and explorations over the past 30 years, often have I stumbled upon spectacle so bravura it speeds the blood and validates existence, but then returned only to discover it was staggeringly diminished, or gone, because of nonsustainable commercial
concerns set to exploit the earth.
I’ve spent a career designing and conducting adventures with purpose, travel that is expectantly meaningful and hopeful to make a difference. And what I’ve learned is that the places we wish to remain protected and wild cannot become so unless visited and appreciated.
The Colorado River still dances through the Grand Canyon largely because those who rafted this cathedral rallied against a proposed dam. The Tatshenshini in British Columbia, a river I pioneered in the mid- 1970s, with the highest concentration of glaciers, grizzlies and bald eagles in North America, was almost victim to an open-pit copper mine,
In Egypt, damming of the Nile decimated a large part of the crocodile population. At the suggestion of a local conservationist, Richard Bangs purchased a young croc in a Cairo market, and released it back into the mighty river.
References:
Archives