Land of the Dawn-lit Mountains

by Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent

  Before I left town the following day I took the Hero for a service.

  ‘This wrong bike to go to Tawang,’ said one of the men watching the thin Bengali mechanic tighten and oil the Hero’s chain. I ignored him but he went on anyway, his words toppling out in an irritating know-it-all whine.

  ‘The road to Tawang is very bad, and very high. It not possible on this bike. It too old, and too small. You should have chosen Bajaj Pulsar instead.’

  I’m generally extremely polite when I travel, particularly in places where a vituperative remark or a sulky face could be someone’s first experience of a Westerner. But I’d come to be extremely fond of my Hero, and the man’s unsolicited negativity made my hackles rise.

  ‘It is the right bike, and it is going to get me to Tawang,’ I snapped, suppressing the urge to swear. ‘I’ve been two thousand miles on it so far, and it’s done nothing wrong. It’s much better than a Pulsar.’

  Despite my angry retaliation, the naysayer did have a point. The former Tibetan stronghold of Tawang sits, eyrie-like, in a mountainous cul-de-sac between the Tibetan and Bhutanese borders. Cut off for centuries from the outside world, now the only way to reach it is by the single winding road that connects it with the rest of India; a road which crosses, at its highest point, the 4,175-metre Sela Pass. Even riding at 2,000 metres had deprived the Hero’s 150cc engine of enough oxygen to make it struggle and splutter – now I was expecting it to cope with double that altitude. A thorough service and new battery would help, but it might not be enough.

  For now, though, I rode south towards Assam on an empty dual carriageway freshly carved and blasted through the receding hills. The lines hadn’t been painted, the crash barrier was half-built and the odd road worker ambled along the new tarmac, spade in hand, but it was still the best road I’d ridden on here. I belted along at an unheard-of fifty miles per hour, a hot wind on my face, occasionally having to swerve violently on rounding a corner to find a lone car or truck hurtling towards me on the wrong side of the carriageway. Thinking back over my journey I realized that, in two months, I hadn’t ridden on a single road that wasn’t being upgraded. From east to west, the arteries of Arunachal Pradesh were being dug up, blasted and sealed with tarmac. After decades of not investing in Arunachal’s infrastructure, lest the Chinese invade again, and only building roads for troop deployment, the Indian government has only recently altered its policy. Never in its history had the region undergone such rapid transformation, and I felt sure that if I returned in five years’ time I would find a very different place.

  A few hours later I reached the toe of the mountains and was kicked out into the pandemonium of Assam. It was a shocking transformation. One minute I was swinging along an empty road in Arunachal Pradesh, the next I was in the midst of a honking, yelling, fist-pumping, flag-waving, political frenzy. State elections were coming up and today, Saturday, tens of thousands of people had converged on the roads to show their support for Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and Sonia Gandhi’s Indian National Congress. I’ve been told that voters are paid between 300 and 1,000 rupees, roughly three to ten pounds, each to rally for a particular party, and they were definitely earning their keep. Convoys of white pickups thundered along the main road, bumper to bumper, crammed with shouting mobs. Men hung out of overcrowded rickshaws, yelling and waving flags. Lanes were ignored. Motorbikes swerved and beeped.

  With no choice but to navigate ninety miles of this madness, before turning north again towards Tawang, I rode west, beeping and swearing liberally, one fume-filled eye on the wing mirror, the other on the verge I’d probably need to dive towards at any minute. ‘Concentrate!’ I berated myself, after several close shaves saw me skittering sideways, yelling with frustration. Astonishingly, amidst all this, the cows remained unfazed. They lay in the middle of the road, chewing their cud, while the maelstrom belched and listed around them. Whether they were Zen masters of the highest order or exceptionally stupid, it was hard to tell.

  When I did dare take my eyes off the road I saw how different Assam looked to the drear place I’d ridden through two months ago. Now February’s dull brown plains yawned south in an infinity of green, the mirror-flat panorama broken only by betel palms, the occasional adobe hut and grazing cows – the green so vast and the cows so small they looked like farmyard toys scattered across a baize cloth.

  What a relief it was to turn north at Balipara and buzz along a miraculously peaceful road flanked by palms, paddies and neat bamboo huts in swept earthen yards. Here little boys sold coconuts from roadside shacks, men in white dhotis led dun cows home from the fields and the air flashed blue with dragonflies. Soon afterwards, as the sun slid beneath the tips of the palms, I stopped for the night at a basic tourist lodge on the edge of Nameri National Park. The concrete huts had definitely seen better days, but at least it was quiet. Or so I thought, until a group of people arrived after I’d gone to bed and decided to have a party until cock’s crow. In between their drunken shouts, the doof doof of their sound system, and a burping gecko nearly giving me a seizure when it landed on my pillow, sleep was scarce. At 5.30 a.m., when a pair of young goats took to bleating plaintively outside my room, I packed up, rode noisily past the sleeping revellers’ huts and set off towards the mountains. Find me a noisier country to travel through than India and I’ll find you the goose that lays the golden egg.

  From there the road ran like an arrow towards the blue massif, a grey causeway carrying me across a green sea. In Bhalukpong, a scrappy frontier town at the juncture of plain and mountain, a swaggering Monpa policeman sat at the desk in a tiny hut and copied the details from my Protected Area Permit, looping my long surname across two rows of the ledger. With his black beret, fake Ray-Bans and gold watch he could have been a border guard in a hundred different countries.

  ‘Where your guide?’ he asked, in a manner which suggested he didn’t really care.

  Although the police had seemed more relaxed the further west I travelled, I thought it best to fib a little. ‘In Tawang,’ I replied.

  He then pointed to John’s name. ‘Where John? He coming?’

  I lied again. Anyway, for all I knew, I might find the mysterious John in Tawang.

  Beyond Bhalukpong the road wound steeply into the mountains between sheer walls of jungle and the hurtling waters of the Kameng, the blue skies of Assam soon giving way to a wadded ceiling of grey. Before the road was built in the mid-1960s it was a nine-day walk from here to Tawang: the Monpa trekking down with woollen blankets and returning with dried fish, matches and Assamese silk. Now the Sumos did it in one long day, and slow English motorcyclists in two. A sign warned people not to travel after sunset, another: SHOOTING STONE SLIDE AREA STARTS. DRIVE CAREFULLY – which I presumed to mean landslides and not some novel form of recreation. Now Buddhist prayer flags streamed between jerry-built roadside shacks and the people were stocky mountain folk with the weather-burnt features of Tibet. Up, up, up the road climbed, clawing its way around the mountains in a series of steep, precipitous switchbacks, a ruched quilt of green falling away below. Soon the Hero was struggling – by 2,000 metres I was crawling up the inclines in first gear, slower even than the merrily painted trucks that rumbled past me in stinking clouds of diesel smoke and dust.

  Respite came in the form of a sudden drop in altitude to an arid, pine-scented valley where a cold river clattered over its shallow gravel bed. In the brief Sino-Indian War of 1962 the Chinese had focused their invasion on Tawang and advanced south through this valley. Since then, the Indian Army wasn’t taking any chances. For twenty miles the road was flanked by check gates, military truck parks, officers’ messes, mule lines, barracks, shrines and dusty football pitches. Gung-ho motivational sayings such as: ‘Winning is a habit’, ‘For Guns, Guts and Glory’ and ‘Truth Alone Triumphs’ lined the roadside, and sentries with sunglasses and slick moustaches stood to attention under signs for battalions with names like The Formidable Five, The Balls of Fire, The Thundering 13th and The Soari
ng Eagles. I imagined soldiers with nicknames like ‘Bear Killer’ and the ‘Madras Marauder’ spending their evenings here waxing their taches and watching Top Gun.

  Climbing again towards Bomdila, a Monpa town straddling a 2,700-metre pass of the same name, the Hero really began to falter. Above 2,000 metres it seemingly couldn’t draw enough oxygen from the thinning atmosphere to function properly, and now it slowed to the speed of an asthmatic slug. I forced its strangulated engine upwards around a string of hairpin bends, bunny-hopping past a sign warning: IF YOU’RE MARRIED DIVORCE SPEED at the dangerous speed of seven miles per hour.

  ‘Come on, little bike, be my Hero. Please!’ I urged, leaning over the handlebars like a jockey.

  I finally crawled into Bomdila in the early afternoon.

  Ursula Graham Bower had once walked across the mountains to Bomdila and found ‘cheerful peasants who whipped their hats off and put their tongues respectfully out at us’ in the traditional Tibetan greeting. She’d dined in ‘Oriental splendour’, then bought some sheep and herded them back across the mountains to the Apatani Valley, clipping them with nail scissors when she arrived. But I found a foggy, shuttered town, deserted on this chill Sunday afternoon. A ‘fooding’ sign led down some steps to the only open restaurant, a tiny, garishly pink room lit by a single bulb, underneath which six Monpa men were hunched over plates of momos. In the corner, an ample woman stood behind a counter making more, filling the anaemic circles of dough with minced beef before deftly pinching them into dumplings. Falling hungrily on a plate of rice and dahl, I thought about the Hero. At least from here it was only a few more miles to the head of the pass, then down just twenty-five miles to Dirang Dzong. While I should easily reach there tonight, in the Hero’s present state there was no chance of making it over the Sela Pass tomorrow. Either I’d have to take a Sumo from Dirang Dzong, or find some way to fix it.

  I’m not mechanically minded, but I knew the Hero’s altitude sickness arose from a simple case of too much fuel and too little air. There was some way of rectifying this – of fiddling with the carburettor to alter the ratio of fuel and air reaching the engine – I just didn’t know what. Luckily Bomdila had telephone reception, and I knew a man who would. Half an hour later Marley had searched his prolific brain and the internet and found a possible solution. All I had to do now was reach Dirang and find a mechanic.

  I popped over the pass an hour later, grinding the last mile so slowly I feared we might slide backwards. On a clear day my efforts would have been rewarded with a view of Arunachal’s highest peak, the 7,090-metre Mount Kangto. But, alas, the gods had drawn a thick grey curtain over the line of the Himalayas, and all I could see was cloud. From here the road slalomed down through a necklace of pretty Monpa villages, completely different to anywhere else I’d been on this journey. The houses were tall and robust, half-tawny stone and half-painted wood, their brightly coloured balconies spilling with pots of scarlet geraniums, while strings of yellow maize dried under the eaves. Earthquake resistant and weatherproof, they were typically Himalayan, the same style as houses from Ladakh to Tawang and all the mountain kingdoms in between. Prayer flags flew over white brick stupas and everywhere were neat stacks of cut firewood, essential for surviving the harsh mountain winters. Even now, in early April, my hands ached with cold.

  The Monpa, Arunachal’s largest Buddhist tribe, were hardy, weather-bitten people in black yak-felt skullcaps, and their animals were huge and hairy. Shaggy yaks grazed on steep hillsides and mastiff-type dogs lay on doorsteps or trotted along the road, bushy tails aloft. Thankfully, unlike their distant cousins in Mongolia and Central Asia, they didn’t seem interested in chasing motorcycles. Of all the days on this journey, none had passed through such differing landscapes – it was bewildering to think I’d begun today in Assam and was now riding through ‘little Tibet’.

  I stopped at the first place I came to in Dirang, a simple wooden lodge on a hillside overlooking the town, and immediately set to work on how to fix the Hero. Marley had told me that by stuffing electric wire inside the main jet of the carburettor and removing the air filter, I should be able to alter the fuel-to-air ratio sufficiently for my Hero to wheeze over the Pass. While the wire would restrict the fuel flow, removing the air filter would allow more oxygen to reach the engine. It was the equivalent of putting the bike on a homemade respirator.

  Two hours later the amiable Nepali manager of the lodge had called a local mechanic and the three of us were squatting around the Hero, studying its carburettor by torchlight. The mechanic, a young Manipuri, had at first ignored me when – through sign language, pointing and the Nepali’s basic English – I’d explained what I wanted done. Instead he’d checked the sparkplug and battery, listened to the engine and poked around the bike for other explanations for its sickness, while I hopped around behind him in frustration saying, ‘No – carburettor, carburettor!’ But I was a woman, I couldn’t possibly be right. Only when he failed to find anything else wrong did he reluctantly follow my instructions, screwing apart the carburettor to poke a length of thin copper wire inside the main jet. For an hour’s work he charged just 150 rupees. Call me idle, but I’d prefer to spend the equivalent of one pound fifty than stay up all night trying to decipher the inner workings of a carburettor. Whether the bodge would work or not, only tomorrow would tell.

  *

  Swaddled in thermals and down, I began the eighty-mile, 3,000-metre climb towards the Pass, zigzagging upwards through taupe, pine-clad hills half-obscured by cloud. Convoys of army trucks clanked by. Sumos dashed past. Trucks ground up the steep inclines in noxious clouds of black smoke. Yaks shambled across the road, skittering nervously as I passed – compared to the docile mithun the Bos grunniens, or grumbling ox, was a far more anxious creature. Stopping at one of the many Buddhist roadside shrines, I drifted my gloved fingers along the line of red prayer wheels and asked to reach the Pass. And at 3,000 metres, when the trees had thinned to nothing and the clouds reduced my vision to a white void perforated by a strip of dusty road, the Hero was still going. Onwards I climbed, slower and slower, crawling steadily towards the summit through a wilderness of cloud. 10km . . . 8km . . . 6km, said the white marker stones by the road. When we crept past the 4km stone I knew we’d make it. Even if the bike conked out now I could push it to the top.

  It was cold. Dregs of snow lay on the rocky verge and the freezing air bit through my two pairs of gloves. How odd to think I’d been in the tropical heat of Assam only yesterday.

  ‘Come on, Hero! Come on! We can do it!’ I yelled excitedly.

  Then, rounding a bend, there it was: a large, pagoda-like gate over the road, the words ‘Welcome to Tawang’ written beneath its golden roof. A line of prayer flags flapped in the breeze and a wonky sign beside a café said: YOUR [sic] ARE NOW AT 13700 FEET. It was the Sela Pass.

  ‘Yes!’ I whooped. ‘We’ve done it!’

  I parked under the gate, did a celebratory jig around my Hero, then dived into the café, where a soldier wearing a woollen balaclava silently served me a cup of tea. Lightheaded from the altitude, I stood in the unlit, empty room stamping my feet and warming my hands around the cup, thinking about how the last few days had been a series of reliefs: escaping Assam’s pre-election fervour in one piece; making it to Bomdila; finding a solution to the Hero’s problem, and now, the relief to be standing here. Each one was a small but significant triumph, a journey within the journey. Now it was just fifty miles to Tawang.

  The road descended through a stark, rocky defile streaked with snow and scattered with miserable-looking army camps patrolled by soldiers in woollen hats and balaclavas. As if these weren’t reminder enough of the 1962 war, below them was a grand roadside memorial to a Sikh rifleman whose death here has become the stuff of legend. According to local lore, 21-year-old Jaswant Singh ignored the orders for his division to retreat from the Chinese in November 1962, instead remaining at his post with two Monpa girls. Only after the heroic trio had killed 300 enemy troops
was their position overrun, Singh killing himself with his final bullet. The official story, though no less heroic, goes a little differently. According to a plaque at the memorial, he and two other soldiers volunteered to attack a Chinese machine-gun post, crawling to the enemy lines under heavy fire and killing the three gunners. Retreating with the captured gun, they were shot dead just as they were climbing back into their own trenches.

  The memorial is a paean to one man’s bravery. A bronze bust of Singh stands on a marble plinth in the middle of the temple-like complex and, beside it, in a glass box, is his immaculately made-up bed. The army treat him as if he’s still alive, stationing six soldiers here at all times to attend to his every need. They serve him bed tea at 4.30 a.m., breakfast at nine and dinner at 7 p.m. His boots are polished every day, his bed made, his uniform ironed. He’s even still awarded promotions. Every passing soldier stops here to pay their respects and legend has it that Singh can be seen guiding military convoys over the mountains in dangerous weather. The Monpa worship him too, believing him to be a local protector spirit. Whatever the truth, Singh’s bravery provides the army with a useful diversion from the embarrassing reality of that thirty-day war. And for passers-by, it’s a welcome chance for a free cup of tea and a samosa, lovingly baked by Singh’s attendant soldiers.

  The clouds thinned. The air warmed. Colour leached back into the barren landscape. Rocks gave way to sparse pines and, later, the town of Jang and a brief, magnificently forested gorge. After this I snaked skywards to Tawang around a foggy, potholed procession of hairpin bends. On another day I might have been able to see Tawang’s monastery – a mighty fortress resplendent atop its narrow spur, the snow-dusted ridge of the Bhutanese border just beyond. But now all of that was hidden somewhere in the clouds. Instead I admired the gangs of female Monpa road workers who hammered at heaps of grey stones, babies peeping from their backs. They raised their masked faces as I passed, returning my greetings with girlish voices and dusty, bandaged hands. Others shifted rocks and shovelled mud, but they always paused to wave. Around five o’clock, sapped from the ride and the changes in altitude, I was riding through the dusty, half-shuttered streets of Tawang’s old market. How happy I was to be here.