Travelling in the North-East in the summer of 2006
Guwahati >> Eaglenest >> Tawang >> Nameri >> Kaziranga >> Shillong >> Cherrapunjee
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My fellow travellers started arriving later in the day. We all met in the hotel lobby, got to know each other and quickly went on with long conversations on birds, Eaglenest and other things we had in our mind for the journey into Arunachal Pradesh.

Our team was in interesting assortment of people. We had a management consultant who worked in the retail industry, a writer who write children’s books, two students of post graduation in biodiversity, two software engineers, an officer in the Indian Forest Service, a beautician and a nomadic traveler(me!). Come to think of it, if it was a gathering of 10 people somewhere in southern parts of India, it would most likely have been 10 guys from the IT industry! Conservation and keen interest in birds and nature was the only thing we had in common that brought us together. It made us at home with each other and we quickly made friends and gelled well with each other.

A bridge near Doimari village in Arunachal where we stopped for a short break. Note the thick forest all around

Some of us in the team were very keen to be of use in saving nature. One of the members spent a lot of her spare time working for ‘Kids for Tigers‘. The writer in the group spent a lot of time writing books to create awareness about environment in children and the IFS officer was leading conservation efforts in Kanchenjunga National Park. I was in great company and I knew that my days in Eaglenest are going to be spent doing something worthy.

We were up and ready to leave at 5am next morning and took a comfortable bus to Tezpur. It broke down after an hour of journey and we had to wait for a spare bus to arrive. Our enthusiastic birding group smelled opportunity in this too and were quickly out with their binocs and bird-books in the lookout for new birds in this unfamiliar region. Further, we stopped again at Nagaon for breakfast and reached Tezpur around 12pm.

There was a jeep waiting in Tezpur to take us through rest of the journey to our camp in Eaglenest. We drove through hot and humid planes via Missamari village in Assam and Doimari in Arunachal. We frequently stopped to sight and hear new birds we had never seen earlier, like the Lesser Adjutant Storks, Grey Backed Shrike and many more. The road started climbing as soon as we left Assam and crossed Arunachal border. Empty and barren stretches of Assam gave way to thick, impenetrable and undisturbed evergreen forests.

We drove till evening in thick forest with our narrow road bisecting the forest. The village of Doimari with a small population and a forest checkpost were the only places where we encountered signs of human presence. We continued to stop for seeing wildlife and were rewarded with sightings of Capped Langur, Khaleej Pheasant, Pied-Hornbill, etc.. We also passed a month old carcass of a huge decaying elephant which had slipped down a slide and died.

It was much after sunset when we reached our campsite. We were all tired after an entire day’s journey and were glad to have finally made it. After a simple and filling dinner, we crashed in the camp looking forward to the next day.

To be continued…

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