Land of the Dawn-lit Mountains

by Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent

  He was followed in 1950 by the intrepid Kingdon-Ward, on his way to a ten-month expedition to Tibet, his forty-one Tibetan porters panting up the hills with ‘botanical presses, reams of botanical drying paper and several thousand rupees in coin’. It was during this trip that Kingdon-Ward found himself near the epicentre of the Great Earthquake, when it hit on the evening of 15 August. Jumping out of his tent, just across the border in Rima, Tibet, he observed how the ‘shaking mountains had a fuzzy outline as if completely out of focus’, and that as well as terror he felt an ‘incredulous astonishment that these solid-looking hills were in the grip of a force which shook them as a terrier shakes a rat’.

  Nowadays the road comes to a dead end before the border and I’d have to return the same way, but it was an area almost no outsiders visited and I wanted to see what was there. I hoped the road was a little less atrocious than in Mills’s time.

  ‘You’ll be a lady alone on a dangerous mountain road, and in opium country,’ the resort owner protested down the phone. ‘It’ll be dangerous if it rains. Take my manager with you.’

  In an attempt to discourage me further he warned me that last year Huawei, a village near Walong, had been cut off for eight months due to landslides. But I didn’t want to take the manager with me or be passed from man to man like some breakable foreign object. Although I was riding into increasingly remote and unknown territory, I wanted to travel alone. Solo travel is like a drug – it has its risks, but it also has the potential to unlock rare feelings of euphoria. Only when I’ve been totally alone, miles from anywhere or anyone I know, have I experienced its pure, unbridled joy. I wanted to eschew guides, to embrace the risks and the fears and go solo in this little-known land. I still had no idea if I could legally travel alone in Arunachal Pradesh, or what would happen if the police stopped me, but I wanted to at least try. Like Freddie Mercury, I wanted to break free – although in this case my longing didn’t involve a Hoover and suspenders.

  When the owner understood I wasn’t going to relent he booked me into the Circuit House in Khupa, a day’s ride away, and told me to use his name if I ran into any trouble. I wrote it in biro across my hand, thanked the manager and left.

  From Wakro it was briefly north to Parshuram Kund, a sacred pool in the Lohit River where Hindus come to wash away their sins. According to legend, the sage Parshuram had thrown his axe at the mountains here, carving a passage for the river. A coachload of devotees arrived as I passed it, nearly running me off the road in their haste for absolution. From here a narrow road wound steeply into the mountains, snaking up their forested flanks in a dizzying series of switchbacks. Soon the cobalt waters of the Kund were hundreds of metres below, the pilgrims mere specks of colour on the shore. Minutes later they were gone.

  It had been sunny in Wakro when I left but now the air thickened to a pale mist and a chill wind shook the trees with urgent gusts. Rain felt imminent. Stopping to put on my fleece, a small voice questioned if riding stubbornly into the mountains alone was really a good idea, but I told it to be quiet and continued. Onwards the road carried me, a ribbon of dirt and broken tarmac twisting and climbing east through a wild profusion of hills, their sheer slopes clothed in dense blankets of greenery and tendrils of ghostly mist. In all directions nature burst forth, rushed and tumbled in a chaos of superabundance, ridge, peak, slope and valley fading from emerald green to bluish grey before dissolving into the haze. Far below, the Lohit – the Brahmaputra’s most easterly tributary – surged through its rocky corridor, height and distance taming it to a whispering stream. This was the Arunachal Pradesh I’d dreamt of, a land of wild, formidable mountains and rivers galloping through deep, sylvan gorges. It was a scene that must have changed little since Butler, Mills et al marched this way a hundred years ago.

  The Hero, which had only just recovered from its muddy ordeal in Namdapha, was not enjoying the climb. The higher we went, the more it stuttered, grumbling up the inclines in first and second gear. When I feared it was about to throw in the towel altogether the road levelled out and a stone by the roadside announced the Udayak Pass. The altimeter on my phone read 1,640 metres, a molehill by Himalayan standards. A tatty little metal shrine, its allegiance to Shiva marked by a rusty three-pronged trident, stood beside the stone, inside which passing travellers had placed incense and candles. Ever superstitious, I added ten rupees and half a banana to the pile and asked for protection ahead. Maybe it was the gods, or perhaps just a stretch of downhill, but after that the Hero gamely recovered its composure.

  Further on I came upon another roadside shrine, its small stone Shiva garlanded with plastic marigolds and smouldering with incense. I stopped beside it and a bony sadhu in brown rags and a turban scuttled over, crablike and acquisitive, muttering mantras as he planted a splodge of brown tikka on my forehead and held his hands together in supplication. I gave him forty rupees and he sat back down on the ground, his work done. I hadn’t expected men like him in these largely animist hills.

  Bar a handful of 4WD Sumo taxis – the main form of public transport in the Northeast – and a few Mishmi men on motorbikes with guns slung across their backs, I had the road to myself. Occasionally I passed idling gangs of road workers, dark-skinned, dirty men and women with infants strapped to their mother’s backs. Squatting, gossiping and lethargically breaking and shifting piles of rocks, they were pictures of ennui. All of them stopped what they were doing, stared and did open-mouthed double-takes as I rode past waving.

  But while the Border Roads Organisation’s efforts to upgrade the road left a lot to be desired, they’d excelled themselves with signage. YOU ARE NOT BEING CHASED shouted one thoughtful reminder from its block of yellow concrete. BE A MR LATE, NOT A LATE MR urged another. AFTER WHISKY DRIVING RISKY reminded a third. And for all those loquacious female passengers out there: DON’T GOSSIP LET HIM DRIVE.

  At Salankam, a collection of ramshackle huts made from bamboo and beaten sheets of rusting metal, I stopped at a Nepali café for chai, rice and dhal. And by late afternoon, when the mist had drawn a veil over all but the nearest slopes, I reached the red and white barrier of the police checkpoint at Khupa.

  7

  MONSOON COME EARLY

  There were many curious things about Khupa, the first being the police. Instead of greeting me with awkward questions, they welcomed me with ‘Hello Ma’am’s and friendly smiles. There were no questions about John, or guides, or why I was alone. They didn’t even ask for my passport. Bamboozled, I signed a register and rode up the hill into the town, convinced the resort owner had made a few well-placed phone calls on my behalf.

  Unless you’re the Assistant Engineer of the Electrical Sub-Division of the Department of Power, Anjaw District (and breathe), or the Block Development Officer, Anjaw District (phew), or the Assistant Engineer of Water Resources Sub-Division Khupa, Anjaw District (you get the picture), or one of the other mysterious government jobs that exist in every town in Arunachal Pradesh, you’re unlikely ever to visit Khupa. Little more than a government administrative centre, the township – if you could call it that – is a charmless jumble of moribund white bungalows, rusted corrugated iron roofs, broken fencing, baggy wires and whirring electricity sub-stations. On a clear day its mountainous location might redeem it but when I arrived the town seemed drab, neglected and curiously short on inhabitants. The only people I saw as I rode slowly up the main street were two Indian men peering through the metal grill of a wine shop. Certainly no foreigners ever came this way. In other parts of Asia you might find aid workers in places like this, dispensing medicines, food and religion from new white Land Cruisers. But as far as I’d seen, there was no foreign aid in Arunachal.

  On a stroll out of town that evening I passed groups of Miju women walking to a nearby village, backs bent under bundles of firewood. Some completely blanked me when I smiled and said hello, a few nervously said hello back. All of them looked dumbfounded to see a foreigner walking by, and one older lady overcame her shock to give me a wo
nderful gap-toothed smile. A few strides later we both turned around at the same time to have a better look at the passing alien, catching each other in the act and breaking into laughter. With no tourists here, and no foreign aid agencies, it’s likely I was the first white person many of them had clapped eyes on.

  The caretaker at the Circuit House, a long white bungalow built to accommodate visiting government employees, was equally surprised.

  ‘You first foreigner come here,’ he announced, opening the door of the VIP suite with a proud flourish.

  Inside was a large white room containing a flimsy wooden four-poster bed, a pleather sofa and a plastic chandelier. The spacious bathroom had eleven taps sticking out of the white-tiled walls, not one of which worked.

  The caretaker was a plump, hairy-eared Bihari, whose attentiveness knew no bounds. He bustled along the veranda with trays of tea and biscuits. He barged into my room unannounced with extra blankets and a heater. He played me his favourite Hindi pop tunes on his mobile. He hovered at my side as I wrote my diary by torchlight. And, just to make sure he didn’t miss anything, he followed me into my room, plopping his fat bottom down on the bed next to me and grinning expectantly. If I’d asked him to trim my nasal hairs he’d have probably said yes. But when I asked him for my room key he looked offended and held it covetously to his chest.

  ‘I keep,’ he replied, returning it to the safety of his trouser pocket.

  At dinner he stood over me as I ate the rice, dhal and salad he’d made, exhorting me to eat the cucumber (‘medicine’) and flying slices of tomato towards my mouth.

  ‘Make red,’ he said, pointing at my cheeks. ‘Which mister like!’ he added, nodding encouragingly, his full lips parting into a smile.

  This wasn’t an ideal situation, I considered, as I went to bed. I was alone in an empty guesthouse, in an odd town, with no phone reception and my only company an extremely friendly gentleman who refused to hand over the key to my bedroom. But, despite the damp handshake and the beaded lip, I felt sure he was harmless, just lonely and lobotomized by boredom, his inappropriateness more a childlike lack of decorum than anything more sinister. The poor man lived alone here, only visiting his wife and children in Assam every few months. No wonder he leapt at the chance of company. I did, however, still sleep with my Leatherman knife under my pillow. Just in case.

  At eight o’clock, during one of Khupa’s many power cuts, it started to rain. It began gently at first, pitter-pattering politely on the metal roof, but soon quickened to a hammering deluge. All night I lay in the pitch darkness, listening as the skies unleashed their fury upon the mountains, considering my options for the following day. It was too risky to try to make it to Walong; rain like this triggered landslides and the road would likely be blocked. Nor did I fancy a cosy stint in Khupa playing tiddlywinks with the caretaker. My only choice was to try to make it down to Tezu, a town near the border with Assam.

  It was still raining in the morning and Khupa looked sodden and desolate. Thick grey cloud lay like smoke on the rooftops, blotting out the hillsides and casting a drear light over the town. It’s only a bit of rain, I kept telling myself, watching waterfalls pour off the roof into newly formed ponds.

  ‘Monsoon come early . . . unlucky,’ said the caretaker, as he waddled into the gloomy dining room with an omelette and two chapatti for my breakfast.

  He stood and watched me eat. ‘Maybe landslide. If landslide, you come back,’ he said, his mouth curling into a hopeful smile.

  Spurred on by this final point I set about preparing for the journey ahead, wrapping myself and my luggage in a rustling carapace of Gore-Tex, plastic bags, dry bags and waterproof covers. By the time I’d pulled on my black poncho, tightening the hood until only my nose and eyes peeped out, and fastened my helmet over the top, I looked like Kenny from South Park on a late-night visit to a Hamburg fetish club. It was the nearest I could get to a hermetically sealed diving suit, although a wetsuit and snorkel might have been more appropriate. Finally, I heaved my leg over the saddle, kicked away the side stand and rode out into the storm.

  The transformation from the previous day was extraordinary. Rivers that had been benign and turquoise were now boiling brown cauldrons with lids of swirling cloud. Waterfalls pounded onto the road where before there had been nothing. Water gouged through the laterite surface in angry little streams. And all the time the rain kept falling, falling, falling – slamming into the earth with such force I couldn’t hear my engine. With visibility reduced to almost nil, all I could see was the road and the eerie silhouettes of trees as they loomed out of the fog. Blinded and bedraggled, I hunched over the bars, my poncho slapping and billowing about me, repeating keep going, keep going, just keep going through gritted teeth. There wasn’t any other choice. In a perverse way I was glad to see the arrival of the rains, to bear witness to their flaying, visceral power. Technically this was just a pre-monsoon taster of things to come; the real thing wasn’t due for another six weeks or more. But I’d never ridden in worse conditions.

  There were no road workers today, or jeep taxis. Everyone, apart from mad dogs and an Englishwoman, had sensibly stayed at home. Then, about an hour after Khupa, a lone bike appeared in my wing mirror and continued to follow me from a distance of about twenty metres. Unable to make out the rider’s features, I wondered if they’d seen me leave town and were waiting for an opportune moment to rob me. But as we rode on instinct told me they were just glad of the company. It wasn’t a day for riding alone.

  I was glad for their presence when, soon afterwards, my bike lodged in a torrent of mud and gravel on a steep uphill slope. I was knee-deep in filth, and struggling to stay upright, when the mysterious figure suddenly appeared at my side – a drenched young Miju man of no more than twenty – pushing me out of the bog. I couldn’t have been more thankful. At Salankam, a few miles on, we stopped for chai and agreed to ride on to Tezu together, where he was at college.

  ‘Critical conditions today,’ he said, in faltering English, staring at the rain.

  I didn’t think it possible, but around noon the deluge intensified, lashing at my eyes through my open visor and blunting the daylight to dusk. We splashed on, barely able to see, weaving between rockfalls and past minor landslides, rounding a corner at one point to find a lorry trapped in a landslide, blocking the entire road. A digger had arrived from somewhere and was clawing at boulders, tree roots and sodden red earth in an attempt to clear a path, but it was several wet hours before we were able to heave and push the bikes over the rocks and mud. The poor Hero wasn’t happy by now, its waterlogged engine stalling and stuttering as we wound down towards the plains. Keep going, I repeated over and over to us both. By around three o’clock we reached the base of the hills and it was only ten miles to Tezu. We were lucky to make it down. It’s funny how when you travel alone help often appears when you most need it. How fortunate I was that fate, or the universe, or whatever you want to call it, had put the young man and me on the same road at the same time.

  In Tezu the Miju, Anilso was his name, led me to a small hotel beside the muddy marketplace, where I rode my dripping bike into a passage and squelched up the stairs. I would imagine Jacques Cousteau stayed drier on most days. Soaking clothes, mushy books, soggy porridge sachets and damp packets of pills were soon spread and hung over every surface of my tiny room, dripping onto the stone floor like a pack of wet dogs. As infernally rattly as my top box was, at least it had kept my laptop and camera dry. What I would have done for a hot shower, but the bathroom had only a squat loo, a cold tap and filthy net curtains.

  Later I took Anilso out to dinner to say thank you. We sprinted through the shuttered marketplace, leaping over puddles, purple fingers of lightning streaking across the night sky. In a one-room shack where Mijus and Tibetans huddled around wooden tables, we ate hot, greasy, delicious chow mein by torchlight. Afterwards I lay on my hard, narrow bed with a celebratory Kingfisher beer, too tired to write my diary but elated to have made it through
the storm and to be here, alone, in this grotty hotel on the far side of the world. As wet and filthy and horrid as today had been, I felt stronger for having endured it.

  After breakfast, I pulled on my damp, smelly gear and set off for Roing under a brooding anthracite sky. It should have been two hours there, west along a road that skirted the base of the Mishmi Hills, but a river was too swollen to cross and its bridge only half-constructed, so instead I had to cut south through Assam. It was only now, cast back into the maelstrom of Assamese traffic, that I realized the damage yesterday’s rain had done to the poor, brave Hero. Not only was the engine still spluttering and losing power but, much more seriously, my previously sonorous horn had been reduced to a strangled, waterlogged whimper. This was nothing short of disastrous. Many Indians drive with their ears, not their eyes: it’s a simple law of effect and cause, and is probably taught by driving schools – ‘no horning, no seeing’. Several people aptly demonstrated my new invisibility by wandering into the road right in front of me, causing us all moments of near-underpant-staining terror. After that I rode along yelling BEEEP BEEEP! like a demented human claxon, animals and people scattering in wide-eyed alarm before my wheels. From the sideways looks they gave me as they lunged towards the verge, I suspect even the goats thought me certifiable.

  At the checkpoint back into Arunachal Pradesh a fat policeman was sprawled in a yellow plastic chair, lost in a thorough inspection of his earwax. An obese goat nibbled at one of the chair legs. Leaping up when he saw me, he hurried into the adjoining police station, returning a minute later at the heels of an older gentleman in a tight cream kurta.

  The older man wrote the Hero’s details in a ledger, his admirable belly resting on the edge of the wooden table. When he’d finished, he reached into a drawer and brought out a plate of sugary biscuits. ‘Refreshments, Madam?’ he said, with a formal wobble of the head.