Beijing Boyce

Schwankert: Seas the day!

Okay, you have this American guy who teaches scuba diving in Beijing (isn’t that one of the driest major cities?), leads a team last August on a two-week diving trip to Mongolia (isn’t that a landlocked country?) for the most intensive probing ever of Lake Khovsgol (lake what?) – a lake with up to two percent of the planet’s fresh water (no way!) - under the flag of the New York-based Explorers Club (the Antarctica, Mount Everest, Sahara Desert, etc guys?) and discovers on sonar a six-meter-long creature that might be what locals call an “underwater deer” (woah!) or this continent’s equivalent of the Loch Ness Monster (double woah!).

This might be a story that interests the media, especially the American media, right? Alack and alas, no.

Apparently, you need to show up with some dubious map that allegedly shows the Chinese discovered the Americas before Columbus. Then, you get coverage left, right and center.

In any case, Steven Schwankert, who led the expedition, will decompress the Lake Khovsgol findings when he speaks at The Bookworm next Tuesday.

I rarely promote such events, but this is an exception, because 1) the pre-trip talk was so intriguing that 2) I lobbied The Bookworm to do a post-trip follow up (see this Facebook group).

Here are the details, courtesy of the Bookworm Web site:

Tuesday, 26th February, 7.30pm

“Shipwrecks of Mongolia and the Underwater Deer”

A presentation by Steven Schwankert

Back by popular demand Beijing-based explorer and writer Steven Schwankert reveals the findings of the 2007 Dive Lake Khovsgol expedition. Along with locating two wooden shipwrecks from the 1920s, the team may have come face to face (kind of) with a lake monster that lake area residents refer to as “The Underwater Deer.”

Join Steven for the first public disclosure of the expedition’s findings, including the premiere display of the team’s photos, video, and artifacts.

Here is a pre-trip danwei.org post about Schwankert.

Nessie: “I get all the press.”