Paddle Diplomacy.

Byline: Mike Stahlberg The Register-Guard

Of China's 1.3 billion registered citizens, only about 500 know how to "roll" a kayak. And half of those have done so only in flat water, not moving white water.

Travis Winn is helping change all that.

Winn, a 20-year-old sophomore in the University of Oregon Honors College, is introducing white-water kayaking to the Chinese and Tibetan people - while introducing the Sichuan Province of China to Westerners eager to experience paddling in the land of giant pandas and colorful Tibetan monks.

Winn helped form the Sichuan Kayak Club during a visit last summer in which he also led a pair of "exploratory" white-water kayaking expeditions in western China, running sections of rivers that never had been paddled.

His adventures and cultural experiences are the subject of "Kayaking Off the Edge of the Tibetan Plateau," a multimedia program that Winn will present Wednesday in Eugene. The show, sponsored by the UO Outdoor Program, begins at 7:30 p.m. in Room 100 of Willamette Hall on campus.

Admission is free. However, Winn is soliciting donations of used kayaks, paddles, spray skirts, helmets, life jackets or other white-water kayaking gear that people may no longer want or need. He will take the donated gear to the Sichuan club when he returns to China in March.

How does someone less than a year removed from high school in Colorado come to be leading "first descents" through raging Class V rapids in western China?

"My dad started running rivers in China in 1994," Winn said. "He was working with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, doing geological reconnaissance."

Winn's father, Pete Winn, still returns to China annually. Relationships he developed with Chinese river runners over the years proved invaluable when he decided to organize "noncommercial" river trips for Westerners.

Pete Winn's Shangri-La River Expeditions of Grand Junction, Colo. - in cooperation with the Chinese group Sichuan Scientific Exploration Association - pioneered the first Class IV and V white-water trips in western Sichuan last August and September.

The younger Winn was the lead paddler on a pair of two-week trips though a region he describes as "a mecca of accessible, unexplored quality white water."

Because of the SARS epidemic scare, Travis Winn said, only two other paddlers accompanied him on the first trip - one man from the United Kingdom, the other from Minnesota.

The Winns' Chinese partner, Liu Li - who plans to start a commercial white-water rafting business in Kanding, the capital of the Tibetan region - showed a knack for promotion by offering the empty seats in the expedition's van to a Chinese television crew.

Liu Li also is the one who urged the kayakers to paddle through Kanding on the Zhe Duo He, a frothy ribbon of white water that is contained by stone walls, making it look more like a canal flowing through the town than a river.

Winn remembers Liu Li telling him that paddling through Kanding "could be very exciting for a lot of Chinese and Tibetan people to watch."

Exciting, indeed.

The urban paddle trip "actually ended up being too much of a sensation," Winn said.

"There were probably 30 people around when we pulled up to the spot we were going to put in. Fifteen minutes later when we got in the water, there were probably a thousand people on the sides of the river. They shut the town down. Everybody quit work. ...

"Monks, old women and little boys alike waved and shouted and chased us as we tried to go slowly down the blue-green torrent they call a river."

The foreign daredevils probably contributed to the five traffic accidents that occurred on Kanding's riverside roads during the course of the hour they were paddling, although the motorists who tried to gawk and drive at the same time get most of the blame.

A photo taken after the kayaking demonstration shows Winn and Dan Monskey, the Minnesota paddler, backed against a wall and surrounded on three sides by a crowd of Chinese seeking autographs.

The kayakers made an even bigger splash in the Chinese media.

Not only was he featured on a popular Chinese adventure sports television show, but Winn had his likeness on the front page of the largest newspaper in Sichuan Province.

The color newspaper photo shows him paddling with Xiao Li, a female member of the Chinese national flat-water kayak team who didn't know how to "roll" her kayak until Winn's group showed her how.

Also, Winn's written account of "Kayaking in the Gongga Shan Area" was published in what he describes as "the Chinese equivalent of Outside Magazine."

The Eugene kayaker had adrenaline-pumping adventures worthy of the U.S.'s Outside Magazine as well, including an episode during his second expedition in which "I just got sucked out of boat" in the midst of big Class V water.

"I hung onto the kayak as long as I could because I thought it would help me float," he said, but eventually he lost his grip.

Fortunately, the kayak washed to shore in a big eddy downstream and was recovered.

"My paddle floated away and I never saw it again. ... It's probably in Burma somewhere," Winn said.

With all the monsoon-powered rivers and streams spilling off the Tibetan Plateau, Winn said, there's no doubt that the area will become a sought-after destination for white-water kayakers.

"Between big mountains and more rain, they've probably got some of the best rivers on the planet - and they're virtually unexplored," he said.

"We've just scratched the surface."

In spite of the great paddling, however, Winn said some of the most memorable moments happened onshore as visitors are awash with the sights, sounds - and smiles - of a new culture.

"We found ourselves interacting with local government officials, national media, monks, Chinese rafters and local villagers," said Winn, who also sipped Yak butter tea, ate Tibetan tsampa (a concoction of barley flour, yak butter and coarse grain sugar that Winn said could make a "good Power Bar substitute').

He also sat shoulder to shoulder with a giant panda as it munched on a carrot.

("One of the best rivers I've ever paddled," Winn said, flows through the Wolong Valley, home to the largest giant panda reserve in the world.)

Later, Winn was surprised to learn one of the cuddly looking pandas had mauled a visitor the previous day.

Perhaps the most surprising discovery, however, "was that many Chinese now have the money and the interest to get on on the rivers themselves. They only need somebody to show them the way."

Travis Winn plans on continuing to do just that. The young white-water ambassador will take a one-year break from school beginning in March to spend more time in western China. He'll also lead two Shangra-La River Expeditions trips that will explore different rivers in August and September. Both are already fully booked.

Before then, however, he's invited two dozen Chinese friends to accompany him on an American white-water adventure - rafting the Grand Canyon.

CAPTION(S):

Left: Travis Winn (in helmet) and fellow paddler Dan Monskey of Minnesota sign copies of white-water rafting postcards for residents of Kanding after padding through the city's river. Below: Winn (center) and his crew, which included Xiao Li (left), made the front page of the largest daily newspaper in Sichuan Province. Photo by Feng Chun Travis Winn, clad in a white-water kayak helmet and spray skirt, exchanges greetings with a robed Tibetan monk on horseback along a trail near the Luchu He River last summer. Winn, a 20-year-old University of Oregon student, shown picking his way through a boulder-lined section of the Tian Quan He River in Tibet and cozying up to a panda bear, will give a multimedia presentation of his travels Wednesday.