Best New Trips in the World: First Descent of Bhutan’s Drangme
ByMary Anne Potts
October 21, 2009
2 min readFor our annual Adventure Travel issue, we scoured the globe to find the 25 Best New Trips in the World for 2010, complete with a Best Trips photo gallery. For the next month, we're going to feature one new adventure daily, starting today with a first decent of Bhutan's Drangme Chhu River. The world's far corners are now well within reach.
First Descent: Drangme
The Drangme Chhu River is Bhutan's largest drainage, a spillway for Himalayan snow and ice that roils into turquoise Class IV and V rapids through sheer granite walls. And it has never been run. But this month a team from Bio Bio Expeditions and its U.K.-based partner, Ultimate Descents, will make a first descent of the Drangme into Royal Manas National Park—an area that has long been closed to tourists due to violence in the neighboring Indian province of Assam. If the test run proves a success, the Bhutanese government will grant Bio Bio permission to guide the Drangme's first official commercial whitewater trip through the now peaceful park in 2010.
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