Stanzin Thinless has just made an alarming admission. "I can't swim," he says. Alarming because we're both floating at a rapid pace downstream, caught up in the cold, caffe latte-coloured swirl of the Zanskar River. It's the end of our wild, bucking, three-hour white-water rafting trip and we've just traded raft for river to cool off. We can float effortlessly in our life vests and wetsuits, but already I'm shivering in the freezing water that comes from glaciers on the Great Himalayan Range to our south. Soon the Zanskar will fuse with another mightier torrent, the Indus. Before that happens, we need to make it back to our raft, bobbing 30 metres away, and not swimming could be an issue. An...
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