Land of the Dawn-lit Mountains

by Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent

  What a contrast to the polished and perfectly manicured American cemeteries of Omaha Beach or Lorraine. Just like the road they had slaved on, the men buried here had died and been forgotten.

  The snoozing soldiers must have realized too late that I was foreign, for when I turned back towards Jagan I was stopped at both checkpoints. The two young recruits at the first one didn’t ask for my passport, but they were terribly concerned about John. Since it’s impossible to apply for a permit for a single person to visit Arunachal Pradesh, Abhra’s contact had added a mysterious Englishman called John Carter to my application. For all I knew John was fictitious. But as far as the soldiers were concerned John was real, and John had absconded without permission.

  ‘Where John?’ they kept asking, pointing to his name on the permit.

  ‘Not here,’ I replied hesitantly, unsure whether admitting to travelling alone could land me in the nearest clink.

  They looked around the bike mistrustfully and glanced up the empty road, as if checking I hadn’t secreted John in a pannier, or hidden him behind a nearby bush. Only when they were satisfied I wasn’t holding poor John hostage did they allow me to go on.

  At the next checkpoint the soldier was ushered away by a plain-clothes gentleman in Ray-Bans and a leather jacket who was evidently ‘The Boss’. But after a brief cross-examination about the whereabouts of John, he again waved me on.

  ‘How many foreigners do you get through here?’ I asked, before I left.

  He looked confused, so I tried again. ‘When you last see English person here?’

  ‘No, no!’ he laughed. ‘You first Britisher I see. I only see on TV before.’

  The main checkpoint to this part of Arunachal Pradesh was east of Jagan, on a broken road that dwindled to dirt. Here a hatchet-faced policewoman, ample bust straining at her khaki shirt, marched out of the hut as I approached, three gangly soldiers trotting at her bossy heels. At the same moment, a passing 4WD stopped abruptly and a Chinese-looking man in a shirt and a purple silk sarong jumped out and strode towards me. For a nanosecond my mind tallied up any transgressions that could warrant my arrest: I was travelling alone; I’d strayed too near the Burmese border; I didn’t have a guide; I’d jumped two checkpoints. But my anxious reverie was broken by the man’s voice.

  ‘Are you Antonia?’ he asked.

  I nodded.

  He held out a hand and smiled. ‘I Phupla.’

  Phupla – Singpho prince, conservationist and guide – was the unofficial king of Miao, the next town, and my one contact in this eastern corner of the state. We’d been in touch by email but hadn’t planned to meet here, and he was hours late for a Singpho festival when he’d spotted the white woman on a bike. Yet his timing couldn’t have been better.

  ‘Why doesn’t she have a guide?’ the policewoman grumbled to him. ‘Why is she travelling alone? Where is John?’ (Even I was beginning to wonder as to the whereabouts of John by now.)

  Only thanks to Phupla’s influence, and assurances that I’d be staying at his camp in Miao, was I allowed through.

  ‘No one comes here on a bike, not even Indians – and all the way from Guwahati!’ laughed Phupla. ‘The guards didn’t know what to do with you.’

  After three confusing checkpoints, the rules regarding foreigners, solo travel and Arunachal Pradesh were murkier than ever, with contacts and chance appearing more important than any official laws. I’d been lucky today, but would it be the same next time?

  A few miles later I stopped, switching off the engine to savour my surroundings and acknowledge my arrival in Arunachal Pradesh. Just as on the road to Jairampur, it was as if I’d crossed into another country, the clamour of the subcontinent dissolving into the peace of the Asian countryside. Gone were the crowds, the traffic, the noise and pollution. In their place birds trilled, butterflies flopped and betel palms rustled gently in the breeze. As I rode on, the faces that looked up from pruning tea bushes and planting paddies bore the flat-nosed, high-cheekboned features of the Tibeto-Burman tribes.

  An hour later I reached Miao, stopping to photograph the ‘Welcome to Miao’ archway, its peeling yellow paint decorated with fire-breathing dragons, Singpho shields and a hornbill flying through a rising sun.

  I’d arrived. Now it was time for the adventure to truly begin.

  5

  INTO THE WILD

  My journey had really begun almost two years earlier, late one summer’s night on the M5 near Tewkesbury. It was the first panic attack I’d had in ten years, but I recognized it immediately. Blurred vision. Breath coming in rapid rasping gasps. Dry throat. Shaking. A wildly beating heart. Worst of all, that terrifying conviction that either death or irreversible insanity was imminent. Veering off the motorway at the next junction, I stopped at a 24-hour BP petrol station and called Marley, hyperventilating so badly I could barely talk. It was midnight but, like a true knight in shining armour, he jumped on his motorbike and sped to my rescue. In retrospect the hour I spent distracting myself in the petrol station by talking to Dave, the diabetic septuagenarian shelf-stacker, about his numerous woes was darkly comic. As was the brief, sleepless night Marley and I spent in the nearby Premier Inn – the pale, miserable night receptionist checking us in with a look that suggested we weren’t the first couple to arrive in different vehicles in the dead of night, asking for a reduced rate. But at the time it wasn’t funny at all.

  The next one hit me, a little inconveniently, halfway through giving a talk to 150 people at a travel festival a few weeks later. Trembling and gulping for breath, I somehow reached the end without vomiting, fainting or dashing headlong through the door. Another one struck a month later, the morning I was due to give another talk. And so on throughout that autumn. Needing simply to press STOP, I postponed my plans for Arunachal Pradesh and instead went to visit some friends in Thailand the following February.

  But in Thailand I unravelled faster than a dieter’s resolve in a cake shop. I had planned to visit friends in Pattaya, go motorcycling around Chiang Mai and idle on a beach somewhere. But instead I spent most of it cowering at my friends’ house, bedevilled by panic attacks, gripped by insomnia, wrestling my mind away from what felt like the cliff edge of insanity. I was supposedly a fearless traveller, a strong, independent woman, someone who relished tramping alone through remote regions. But here I was cringing beside a nice, safe pool in Thailand.

  When I did attempt to leave my friends’ house, the first of many panic attacks hit me on a ferry crossing from the mainland. A full-blown batshit assault on my already fragile neurons, it convinced me that I was either about to die of a heart attack or inexplicably hurl myself overboard into the churning, turquoise waters of the Gulf of Thailand. I felt about as stable as francium. Fear of imminent death has a wonderful way of blunting your inhibitions: I knew I had to talk to someone, anyone. Turning around in my seat, I scanned the cliques of tanned, chattering backpackers behind me, my eyes alighting on a pair of clean-cut thirty-something men.

  I walked over and plonked myself in an empty seat beside them. ‘Erm, hi, this sounds a bit odd, but I’m having a panic attack. Do you mind if I come and talk to you?’

  ‘Sure, of course. My name’s Roland,’ said the elder of the two, proffering a hand. ‘I’m a psychiatrist from Berlin. Why don’t we take a walk?’

  But while Roland’s soothing tones provided temporary relief to my addled mind, things soon went wrong again, and after two weeks of vile emotional torment I flew back to England, three weeks earlier than planned.

  The next few months were a mess. I couldn’t be alone, couldn’t work and cancelled talks, the corset of fear ever tightening around me. Forget Arunachal Pradesh, I wasn’t able to go to London alone for the night. The apogee was a particularly bad weekend in May when, for a second time, I ended up talking gibberish to the staff at a BP service station in Wiltshire. I emailed BP Customer Care afterwards to commend their employees on their dealings with passing lunatics. The reply came back:

 
‘We hope that you will continue to enjoy many more happy visits to BP service stations in the future.’

  Desperate to be rid of this canker, I tried a range of cures.

  ‘Get a stone,’ said the white, middle-aged shaman, when I called her on FaceTime at her west London home. ‘Blow on it every time you feel anxious and, when the stone is full, bury it in your garden and find another one.’

  ‘Put the raisin to your ear, and really listen to it,’ urged the matronly teacher at a mindfulness course.

  ‘Try these pills,’ said my charming South African doctor.

  ‘Focus on the air as it enters and exits your nostrils,’ soothed Andy on my Headspace app.

  I dutifully blew on stones, listened to raisins, practised daily yoga and meditation, took pills and saw a therapist, treating getting better like an exam I couldn’t fail.

  In the midst of all this I received an email from my agent saying I’d been offered a publishing deal for this book. It was what I’d so wanted. But instead of greeting the email with cartwheels around the kitchen, I felt a gnawing uncertainty. It was July, and I knew I’d never be able to leave for Arunachal in October, as originally planned. I couldn’t go anywhere by myself at the moment, let alone fly to the other side of the world.

  ‘I don’t think I can do it,’ I said miserably to Marley. ‘I’m going to have to turn it down.’

  ‘You’re not going to turn it down,’ he replied. ‘You’re going to get better, I know it. Just sign it and see what happens.’

  So I signed the contract and decided to put Arunachal Pradesh out of my mind for the next few months and just focus on recovering my sanity.

  I know. It all sounds completely bonkers. And it was. To someone who’s never had a panic attack it must sound ludicrously melodramatic. But I’m by no means alone. Panic disorder affects roughly two per cent of the British and American population. Charles Darwin was a sufferer. So were Sir Laurence Olivier, Sigmund Freud, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Charlotte Brontë, Nikola Tesla and Edvard Munch – the latter’s iconic painting The Scream a visual representation of one of his attacks. They can hit you at any time, and for no apparent reason, like a storm in a seemingly clear sky; a stab of real and present fear fired by the same receptors that told our ancestors to run from a sabre-toothed tiger. You shake, go numb, can’t breathe properly and are in no doubt of your own looming extinction or soon-to-be-issued one-way ticket to the nearest asylum.

  My derailment was, in retrospect, unsurprising. I’d been pushing myself too hard for too long: working in television, writing a book, writing articles, giving talks. I worked before I went to work. I worked during my lunchbreaks at work. I worked at weekends. I worked in the evenings. Push. Push. Push. With no respite. I’d forgotten why I was pushing so hard, or what it was I was so desperately striving for, but I’d had my foot on the accelerator for so long it had stuck. My life had become a joyless, ensnaring game of Tetris, the blocks held in place by worry and pressure and endless calculations about time and when and how. I was a travel writer, for goodness sake. This was supposed to be fun. But it wasn’t. It was a military operation, with me as the cajoling brigadier. I’d hit burnout.

  Slowly, however, I recovered. By late summer I was able to go away without Marley for a night. By the autumn I was giving talks again, speaking, at the end of October, to an audience of 750 at the Royal Geographical Society – only a handful of people there knowing what it really meant for me to stand up in front of that crowd and be OK. It was only then, after months of burying all thoughts of it, that I again considered Arunachal Pradesh. I still desperately wanted to go, but was I capable, after everything that had happened? There was only one way to confront my lingering demons, and that was to commit to going in the spring, to throw a grappling hook over the lip of the abyss and see if it held. If it all went pathetically wrong at least I’d have tried. The alternative was to sit at home wondering, bitter, afraid, dependent on Marley, a shell of my former self. Anything was better than that.

  So in spite of my silent conviction, to the very last, that the expedition wouldn’t happen, I’d boarded the plane to Delhi, reached Guwahati and ridden the first few hundred miles. And, to my great relief, the grappling hook had held.

  Miao sits at the edge of the seething jungle, the final port before an ocean of emerald wilderness. Beyond yawn Namdapha, India’s third-largest national park, and the violent forests of Burma’s Kachin state. Originally dominated by the Buddhist Singpho, the town was now home to an ever-expanding population of migrants and refugees, driven to this wild corner of India by politics and poverty. In the bazaar, Lisu women squatted behind piles of red chillies, ginger, garlic, coriander and tiny purple aubergines, calloused feet poking out from the hems of brightly woven sarongs; Bangladeshi tailors pedalled at antique Singer sewing machines; Bihari men stood at stalls crammed with tawdry Chinese tat; Tibetans sold momos in shacks strung with prayer flags. With all these peoples had come their beliefs, stamped on the streets and alleyways in wood and stone. Candles flickered around chipped deities in little Hindu shrines, crosses stood outside the wooden churches of the heavily Christianized Lisu and, in the main Buddhist temple, Nepali boys darted between the pillars, laughing and shouting, ‘How are you I am fine,’ in shrill staccato voices.

  I rested here for a few days in the quiet of Phupla’s camp, an oasis of thatched huts near the stony banks of the Noa-Dihing, where vented bulbuls bickered in silk-cotton trees and fruit bats gorged on plums in the eaves of my hut. The only guest, I was given the full memsahib treatment by his merry trio of staff: Sanjay, a blithe Nepali teenager whose high voice filled the camp with Hindi ballads from first light; Dorje, a shy Tibetan boy, and Bijay, the young Manipuri cook. They sang and whistled and chopped and cooked from dawn until dark, regularly appearing outside my hut with trays of tea and biscuits. If I needed anything from town Sanjay would insist on riding pillion, clinging on as we splashed across the river and bumped up the stony hill, springing off at the end with a ‘Perfect journey, Madam’, and an approving wobble of the head.

  Their pièce de résistance was supper, which Sanjay would announce with a beaming ‘Dinner ready, Ma’am’, at seven on the dot, and Dorje would reverently serve, covering the small dining room table with dish after wonderful dish. There I’d sit like the Queen at a tasting banquet, mopping up spicy fish curry and chana masala with fresh, doughy chapattis and forkfuls of fluffy rice, washed down with warm Kingfisher beer bought from one of the numerous wine shops in town.

  Phupla, now dressed in jeans and a polo shirt, appeared at the camp each morning and we’d sit in the weak sunshine talking and drinking phalap, bitter Singpho tea. A brisk, efficient man of around forty, with receding hair, pale skin and an inquiring gaze, he had the air of a kindly Oriental potentate. Sharp as a tack, he’d been ‘topping’ at his Catholic college in Shillong, yet he wore his intelligence lightly, his conversation broken by bursts of laughter. He had never met a lone female traveller before – certainly not one on a motorbike – and he studied me in the way one might scrutinize an unknown creature you’d found under your bed. The few tourists he dealt with were generally Indian birdwatchers and groups of Dutch trekkers. He questioned me about my age, marital status and why I travelled alone, steepling his fingers and going ‘hmmm’ at my answers, as if completing a mental questionnaire.

  His father had been a Singpho king, a great hunter who shot sambar with a homemade muzzle loader and was employed to catch wild elephants for the government in the 1970s. Mela shikar, a practice officially outlawed in India in 1981, involved the lassoing of wild elephants from the back of a domesticated one, a koonki. Smeared in elephant dung to disguise their smell, the mahouts would ride their koonki into the middle of the wild herd, stopping undetected next to the victim of their choice. Being short-sighted creatures that rarely look up, the unfortunate beast wouldn’t know a thing until the jute lasso slid over its neck. Ironically it was the elephants’ instinctive reaction to protect their trun
ks by pulling them up into their mouths that allowed the lasso to tighten. It took a brave man to catch wild elephants, and many a mahout was gored or trampled to death.

  There were still cases of illegal mela shikar, said Phupla – ‘elephant boys’ from the Singpho and Khampti tribes catching young animals that strayed into their villages. Trained elephants were worth between seven and fourteen lakh rupees, around £7,000–14,000, a fortune here by any standards.

  The Political Officer, Major John Butler, perhaps irritable after an evening of fitting his windows, dismissed the Singpho as a ‘rude and treacherous people’ whose ‘excessive laziness, immoderate addiction to opium and general uncertainty of character’ made them ‘anything but good subjects’. But Phupla was anything but this. Generous with his time and knowledge, he had time for everyone.

  ‘I have many friends,’ he said. ‘That’s what I learn in life – friends are important, not money.’

  Butler had been right about one thing, though, and that was the opium, which Phupla bemoaned as the scourge of Miao. But it wasn’t just good old-fashioned opium the masses were getting high on; it was ‘brown sugar’ now too, brought here by unscrupulous dealers from Dibrugarh and cut with ‘rat poison and God knows what’. Around twenty-five per cent of Miao’s young men were addicts, said Phupla sadly, and people were dying all the time. But the government was doing little to help and, when he had set up a detox camp for local addicts, there was no official support.

  ‘I’m worried about you travelling alone,’ he warned. ‘There are so many addicts here, you might get robbed.’

  After a few days of being in Miao, Phupla reminded me I had to register with the police. At the police station, a run-down collection of buildings around a weed-strewn courtyard, I was questioned by a brusque, bosomy Singpho policewoman with petulant red lips and a dangling .303 Lee Enfield. Miao wasn’t marked on my permit, she intimated in halting English, stabbing my list of permitted places with a long scarlet fingernail. She followed this with: ‘Who accompanying you?’ and ‘Where John?’ Two more men were summoned – Miami Vice types with pleather jackets and slicked-back hair – and we sat in a cell-like room stacked with dusty ledgers while they studied my permit. I mentioned Phupla and pointed out that Namdapha was on my permit, and after a few tense minutes they pushed a register across the table and asked me to sign it. It was like learning by Braille, trying to understand the permit regulations here.