Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Travel

Wanderlust
Getting over it
I fled New York, then I fled Paris. In Italy I stuck around a while, for something called "like love."
By Deirdre Guthrie
[09/24/99]

Travel Advisor
Memphis marathon
Our travel expert explains how to kill eight hours in Elvis-town, what to do in Dubai, and where to find tourist-office information.
By Donald D. Groff
[09/23/99]

Book Bag
In the family way
As a new anthology shows, traveling en famille delivers its own lessons and rewards; you just have to use a different map.
By Don George
[09/22/99]

Out of the Blue
Welcome to the Mile-High Club
Our flying correspondent relates some true tales of sex in the skies.
By Elliott Neal Hester
[09/21/99]

The tearful secret of Themar
A grandmother's tale, untold until now, opens a path of understanding and forgiveness.
By Robert L. Strauss
[09/20/99]

Complete archives for Travel

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

It's a big job he's taken on. At every turn he finds himself talking until he's blue in the face, trying to explain how protecting rivers really is good both for the environment and for tourism. He delivers his mantra to politicians, government ministers, electric company managers and the man on the street. Every day is a new challenge: "One of biggest educations we must make is for people not to use the river only for washing their cars or changing their oil, which is quite popular." Even the river guides he himself trained sometimes need reminders that dynamiting rocks out of the way or cutting down low-hanging trees may be expedient but not environmentally sound.

Though his message is slowly being heard, he gets little help, especially from the government, which would prefer he not even use the English word "raft" in his promotions. "They would prefer I use the Croatian 'splavarenje,' from 'splav,' for wooden raft or log raft -- which no one understands, and makes my message even harder to get across."

Kelemen's biggest fight at the moment is trying to prevent a second dam on the Dobra River, 60 miles outside of Zagreb. He first ran commercial trips on the Dobra in 1989, with great success. Using information generously passed on by electric company workers, he coordinated the day trip with water releases from the existing dam. Now, thanks to his high-profile campaign against new dams in Croatia, those once-friendly electric company employees are forbidden from giving him any information. This makes it difficult to schedule trips on the Dobra.

"Now that tourists are slowly coming back to Croatia, it would be great to get back on the Dobra. Before the war we'd made contracts with people who live near the top of the river to help them develop camps, to build rooms, to expand their farmhouses to accept tourists, all with support of the National Tourism Board. Which means there are more and more people against the industrial use of the river."

But his opponent, the national electric company -- HEP -- is a powerful monopoly. "How powerful? This congress gave them a concession to use rivers to make and sell electricity. They are supposed to pay 1 percent of the money they make selling energy to the state. Out of arrogance, they never signed the contract and refuse to pay the 1 percent. But no one can tell them to stop producing electricity, because then we have no electricity.

"There are 16,000 people working for HEP and I'm not fighting all of them, just a few top management who don't care," says Kelemen. "These managers make like $9,000 a month; the average salary in Croatia is $400 a month. They can't possibly understand how a raft guide who makes $40 a day feels about protecting the river."

The Dobra's 12-mile raftable stretch is close to Zagreb and its citizen and tourist base. Ironically, Kelemen and his then-novice guides perfected the run during the war years. "There were thousands of United Nations troops stationed in Zagreb, with nothing to do," he says. "There was a U.S. MASH hospital at the airport, with hundreds of doctors and nurses just waiting in case they were needed. Most of the injuries they treated were from basketball. A Finnish construction battalion spent its time building a bridge and a sauna for themselves. Canadian and French soldiers were stationed near the airport. They were all looking for some recreation on their time off. I offered them rafting trips.

"They were all young people, trained and fit," says Kelemen, and he used them as guinea pigs as his guides learned the river. "It was easy to bring them to the river with beginner guides because if the boat flipped, they were happy. We put in just below the dam's power plant. When they released water we had 50 cubic feet per second for the first two, three miles. There's one big hole that can flip boats easily, and lots of big waves. It was the biggest thrill most of them had during their service here.

"We did those trips in May and June of 1993. Then rockets attacked Karlovac and we could hear bombs falling around Zagreb. After that they were not allowed to leave their stations, so it was a short season."

Still, those trips generated local media interest. The following year, hordes of locals sought out Kelemen to organize more rafting trips. "People had heard about rafting, seen it on television in places like the Grand Canyon, and now it was here in their country. I figured I should concentrate on them, because the more local people I brought to the river, the more people there would be against building new dams."

With Atlas' help he bought five Avon rafts and organized a race on the Dobra, garnering even more attention. ("It was beautiful weather, with sponsors providing beer, Coke. We all got suntans; it was great.") Now all of Zagreb wanted to go rafting.

Despite initial skepticism from his bosses, in the waning years of the war, canoe and rafting trips became a boomlet for Atlas, selling out weeks in advance to tourists from Germany, Italy and Scandinavia.

"The hardest part was that 99 percent of the people had never been in a canoe before," remembers Kelemen, "and it was very difficult for them just to go straight."

In the last three years, he and Atlas have expanded to several rivers near the Dalmatian coastline, where thousands of tourists flock to the beaches every summer. But Kelemen's favorite rivers are inland, particularly the Una and Mreznica, each featuring dozens of beautiful waterfalls and difficult rapids. He knows that, thanks to the destruction in Kosovo, not many foreigners will make the Balkan peninsula a vacation destination in 2000. But his campaign to keep the rivers free of dams continues.

"The only problem is that now I'm wasting 90 percent of my time on things I shouldn't. Now I spend a half-hour each day organizing trips and five hours writing letters to ministers.

"Just today," he says, "I sent a letter to the Minister of Environment. I need his help if I'm to do canoe trips in the national parks. I sent him statistics that I picked up in Denver last summer that show the incredible economic impact rafting has on that state. How many people it employs, that kind of thing. River-rafting in Colorado generates $100 million a year, which a country like ours -- in big economic trouble, where unemployment is a big problem -- needs to seriously think about.

"What reaction will I get? Probably nothing. But I have to keep trying."

Next page | A Croat and a Serb work together