October 8, 2026
65 kilometers of cliff-slamming currents and holes in the Orkho-Bom gorge.
Hi folks!
Back to my habit of mixing things up both chronologically and geographically, today’s report isn’t from Southeast Asia (Laos); it’s from Buryatia – just north of Mongolia. Actually, Laos is directly south of Buryatia, but I digress…
First – quick recap…
Our Sayan Oka River escapade: ~280km to cover on the water, with a couple of rapids and countless very interesting riffles along the way. We started at the Buryatian village of Orlik, and from there it’s all the way down to Verkhneokinsky (Irkutsk Region). The elevation at the start is ~1370m, and at the finish it’s ~560m. That’s a total drop of ~800m. Along the way the river cuts through the Eastern Sayan, where it gets pretty wild in places. That stretch is roughly 170–180km long (depending on how you count it); the rest is the warm-up/run-up at the beginning, plus coming out onto the plain and floating down to the finish at the end. Everything in-between is in the mountains. The most interesting and most action-packed segment of the whole run is the Orkho-Bom gorge, which is 65km long – though I never did figure out exactly where it begins or ends.
The first two days of rafting were fairly calm: we just cruised along with the current – only occasionally paddling over to where it ran faster. And now and then we came across some shallows and easy little riffles.
But then we came to the start of the mountain section – waaay over there, just before those mountains, was the left turn into the gorge. And we’re off!…
First things first: it’s simply beautiful here:
Secondly, the water there gets a whole lot livelier, fiercer, and more interesting:
The views from above are just… wow!
Once you enter the canyon, the main thing you need to do is get yourself “parked up” in time – before the first rapids. Otherwise the afternoon could turn out to be anything but leisurely. But… surprise! All the good parking spots – long known to our guides – turned out to be taken. So we had to improvise… And it worked! We ended up with a pretty prime spot on a small island – clearly used by rafters, but not yet taken:
The spot turned out to be downright prime one – with a small calm stretch of water and a sandy beach around the back:
Stopping for the night and getting some rest is a serious business. It calls for a careful approach, some scouting, and then the standard routine: unloading the rafts, setting up camp, rigging the tarp over the tables, and cooking a meal on the gas burners – but a little firewood ought to be gathered too, for the evening’s meditation…
A wonderful little spot!
The next morning, first up on the rafting menu were a couple of Class IV rapids. // Naturally, for serious rafters those are nothing, but for genuine, serious… office plankton they’re off-the-charts adrenaline! Although from the side it doesn’t look all that threatening (but that’s deceptive):
If you take a look at the second stage from above – whoa! – it gets interesting down there. There’s a spot where the current slams into the cliff and, right in the middle, a rock with a “hole”:
But what choice did we have? We just had to do it!…
Where exactly these pics were taken is impossible to tell anymore. Maybe in those rapids – or maybe in the riffles farther down where we could have skirted the “holes” off to the side. But we came here for the white-water action, after all! So we dove right into the most interesting stuff:
A joyride down the Oka River when the water level’s good is simply wonderful! Even if your arms and legs are a little shaky afterward from all the aquatic physical exertion.
From the trip journal:
“Hard physical leisure.”
To which someone, for some reason, added:
“Every old dog has its second youth.”
What that was all about, I can no longer recall…
