Couple of short Buxa notes.

My love affair with that part of the country started in 2008 and is showing no signs of any decay. Though I dont get to roam around like I used to do before, still I get to travel through the same forest roads, railway tracks, see the same old faces. Even prosaic things like a tree stump or bend of a rivulet lights up some long forgotten memory which might be spectacularly boring to everybody else.


The railway track between Siliguri and Alipurduar could rival many of our famous touristy tracks in terms of sheer scenery. Apart from the unique fact that it passes through mesmerizing landscapes of three Protected Areas, (Mahananda Wildlife Sanctuary, Jaldapara Wildlife Sanctuary and of course, Buxa) the whole journey will provide you ample visual feed if you, like me, get excited by watching ancient leafless Simul trees, green carpet of tree gardens, distant hills of Bhutan and desolate rudimentary stations with the colourful tribal population eagerly waiting for their main means of transport. Apart from the express trains passing through the tract till Guwahati, there are a couple of trains to and fro from NJP. The rush is much but trains are never jam packed, food vendors are abound, and the speed is comfortable enough for detailed scrutiny from the windows. In fact, the passenger train is so passenger friendly that you could hop down, chat with an old acquaintance and jump up without losing breath.


It was this lethargic train that was taking me back to Siliguri, sometime back. The weather was still comfortable and it was a bright blue day.I had started very early from Alipurduar so the entire sunrise sky with its cosmic palette had given me a wave off. There was a morning breeze and I was totally at peace with the world, having just finished my second helping of "jhal muri". The passenger was chugging its way through some extensive tea garden patch near Sevoke. As always I was glued to the window watching the different colurs and hues pass by. Suddenly, there was something very bright in the horizon. I looked up and noticed that they were leafless Sirish trees with their seed pods. The dry branches and the pods were of an astonishingly bright yellow hue, almost fluorescent! Then I looked at the landscape again and found that the sentinel like trees were standing in the middle of tea bushes, bright tender green themselves. Stunned by this tango of green and yellow, I looked further up to discover that the background frame was a cloudless, spotless azure wash-out sky. It was one of the most magical combination of colours I had ever seen. So perfect that you would not feel like replacing any of the elements. Tranquil yet vibrant.


The train picked up speed suddenly and wafts of black smoke drifted past the window from the breathless engine. Just like that, the tea garden and the Sirish trees were gone, leaving me wondering whether taking out my camera in that short span would have been wise. Another colour combination came, to be replaced by another. Siliguri was almost beckoning in the horizon. I looked around for my third helping of jhal muri and thought Doors had done it again! It had given another minute, yet priceless memory.








The tree in the compound...
The bustling city of Alipurduar was not a city always. During one of the visits to Buxa, I had got hold of a book on history of Doors which had said that tigers used to roam freely in downtown areas during early twentieth century.


True, once you pass the railway junction and cross Damanpur, the struggling jungle still embraces the blacktop on both side. Of course, if you follow the same road, you reach Rajabhatkhawa, the gateway to the wild outdoors.


The divisional forest office of the region is situated in a huge building inside an equally spacious compound. During my fieldwork in Buxa, I had to pay a visit every couple of weeks and wait eternally till the Mahan forest officers gave me ten minutes to talk about my work which we were incidentally doing on their behalf. During one of those frustrating afternoons, I had come out for a smoke after half an hour of warming the waiting bench. Just near the gate, there was a huge tree which I still havent identified. It was imposing with a huge crown and looked like it was there when they were constructing the building. Casually looking up, I discovered an astonishing sight. Four black ibises were sitting on top and babbling excitedly!! How on earth these waterbirds came to land on this tree in the middle of this dirty congested part of town was beyond me. To compound the confusion, ibises are not birds you will find around every waterhole. Poeple were going in and out of the building but not a single person ever looked up and noticed these misplaced creatures.
I remember feeling so strange seeing them there that I forgot about the smoke. Eventually , they flew away noisily this time probably to a safer haven. The call from inside eventually came but I was still so excited that after coming out and going to a cyber cafe, I described the entire event to P over chat.


That was back in 2008 when only official chores brought me to Alipurduar from the depth of the jungle. Subsequently, my visits to Buxa only centered around the city and the forest office. Instead of forest rest houses, I was staying at city hotels. It was forever paining to be in the city and think and just an hour's drive could transport me to my favourite wild haunts. Still, the old tree did not disappoint during the last visit. By the time we had met the officers and came out, it was dusk. In that golden transition, a single chloropsis was sitting on one of the branches and singing loudly. Though not as shockingly out of place as the ibises, the pretty green bird was still a forest dweller! True to its reputation as an excellent mimic, the choloropsis was exhibiting its total range of vocal magic. As I looked at the bird in the slowly fading light, a strange thought struck me.


If we could understand what it was saying, what will we find out? It seemed to me that just like the ibises, it was trying to remind the Alipurduar janata that though they are ever invading and choking the jungle, there still existed a wild beyond. Where dusk was still greeted by the singing chloropsis, not by blaring vehicle horns and self absorbed homo sapiens.

Promise kept..nevertheless..

The evening is almost upon Gangtok. Though instead of darkness, a strange dusky pale haze descends on the street below my window where excited children play games with nothing, and almost everything. As I look across the street to the distant hills of Bhushuk on the opposite ridge and at the matchbox-sized houses dotting the green carpet from where faint swirls of smoke from the evening hearths are rising, it suddenly strikes me that how quickly these four years have flown by, giving much, hurting a little and transforming me into a Himalaya addict for life. Every trip that I have made, every landscape that I have traversed, trekked or even crawled through has been special and very different in its own way. Every trip promised much more than I could gather with my limited receptive ability within the limited time frame, and though I have not been able to keep my own promise and re-visit many of these areas, HE had kept his promise in the one area where I did visit again and again, winter, summer and monsoon.

 Another Barsey interlude, again going back to the jammin' sessions with LT. Though when I was making my first exploration trip in the Hilley-Barsey route, he had not joined me yet. My head bursting with excitement, heart almost pumping at the prospect of going into the depth of this amazing forest, I had made that trip quite early in the chilly and misty morning. As expected, I was expecting to see a red panda sitting on tree tops around every bend, a fleeting barking deer in every bush ans possibly even a clouded leopard jumping across thetrail. What I obviously found soon enough was that sighting anything apart from oaks and Rhododendrons in this landscape was a whole different ball game from what I had expected. Strange shapes with exotic colours were flying across the trails, strange calls were heard from the dense bamboo clumps, but I could make out absolutely nothing. The shapes vanished even before I could focus my vision to them and the owner of the calls never showed up. I soon felt very dejected wondering how many of Sikkim's 550 species of birds will ever give up its secrets to me.

Turning a corner from a dense patch of Hemlocks, I was completing another bend with dense bamboo on both sides when some movement on my left suddenly halted me in my track. There was something small, quick and very bright hopping around in between the bamboo clump on my left. I crouched low, ceased making any further movements and strained my eye muscles for the eventual revelation. However, 5 minutes and the movements suddenly vanished and the bird melted away somewhere. Utterly frustrated once again, I was about to get up when suddenly a loud, clear chirp came from the same area. I immediately crouched again and there he was! Dark slaty blue, with a distinct white eyebrow, the male whote-browed shortwing was looking at me with the same amount of curiosity and posing as if displaying inside an amphitheater. There was a brief magical interval when neither of us moved. Though I was motionless, inside I was jumping with joy and excitement. Though not the rarest bird in the world, shortwings are curious little plump and largely ground-dwelling birds which are extremely shy and skulking, preferring moist forests with dense undergrowth of bamboo and nearby water sources. It was a rather unusual bird adapted for a special kind of habitats and it was definitely my first encounter. Suddenly the bird slipped away deeper in the bamboos and vanished as quickly as it had done previously. I still stood spellbound for a shortwhile and then started the return journey to the basecamp, a happy and elated soul. I did not want to see red pandas any more, at least for that day.

More than three years pass in between with many more fascinating birds eventually rewarding my patience in many more fascinating forests. The shortwing, however, was forever etched in my memory and whenever I had to come even near to Barsey, or made hurried trips inside it, it seemed like it was there, waiting for me take a careful look.

Finally there was the chance!! I got some free days from my chair-bound schedule and joined my colleagues for a ten day trip inside Barsey when the skies were deep azure and the mornings were full of ground frost! It was December! After reaching  the barrack on ridgetop and settling in, next afternoon found us going down to Hilley to explore a new area to install our camera traps. I was walking ahead of the group and walking quite briskly when suddenly turning a bend I had a strange feeling.

There was nobody or nothing else there on the trail and the air was also very still. I looked around to the area I had just left behind and saw the patch of ancient Hemlocks. I looked ahead and saw dense bamboo all around. It finally sunk in. I was standing at the exact bend where the shortwing and I had our first meeting. The whole atmosphere was expecting something and a strange silence descended on the forest. I did not quite know what to make of it but then I did not have to.

As if on queue, came the exact clear, loud chirp which I had heard three years back. This is too good to be true!! Though this was the predominant thought rushing in my head, I was hoping otherwise. And surely, my little friend did not disappoint. There it was, sitting in a familiar posture inside familiar bamboo clumps. I stood transfixed, amazed and overall transformed at the coincidence. May be it was a simple co-incidence.May be this was the stretch where shortwings nested. Quite possibly (and confidently) this might not have been the same bird which had showed up in 2007.

However, I wanted none of those logical conclusions. To me and my still awestruck mind (The bird slipped away very soon like it always did), it was the most magical co-incidence possible, even if it was a co-incidence. As many things have changed in these four years and keep on changing, I felt a very comforting assurance in the shortwing's presence. 

He was there and he had kept his promise, even after three and a half years. I knew immediately then whatever boulder life hurls at me in the coming three years, everything will be all right.

One who got away

It has been a very long hiatus predominantly due to which this new blog has older posts only. While life has crawled, clawed, threatened to bang my head against a blank dashboard and even after every blow made everything worthwhile every now and then, that is not what I am going to talk about because I would really suck even if I tried.

This is about another life spent in the shadow of the mammoth snow white Singalila spurs and ancient gnarled Rhododendron trees in that great misty forest. Like it happens so often, this life had promised so much but was stopped in his tracks leaving us grasping and gasping to fathom what just happened. Thsi is about the one who got away.

When I was packing for my first field trip in Sikkim with a bagful of unnecessary items and a headful of excited ignorance, I was given one practical advice- reach Barsey Rhododendron Sanctuary and get hold of Lakhpa Tenzing the forest guard who would be my friend, philosopher, guide in this then-alien land. When I eventually reached Barsey and parked myself in that fabulous lodge on the ridgetop, surrounded by partially flowering Rhododendron arboreum forests, I was told that Lakhpa Tenzing could not make it that day and would only arrive the morning after. When the morning was also merging into the afternoon, I was beginning to get irritated thinking for the next ten days, i was to be stuck with an irresponsible moron. Eventually when he did turn up, a rather handsome young man with a guilty smile , my resolve to speak my mind was blown out by his impeccable knowledge of the area and its flora and fauna. Even in the first meeting, I could make out that his knowledge of botany was astounding and I was in for a great entry point into wild Sikkim for the coming these days.

This was not the first time that Lakhpa was accompanying a greenhorn from WWF in Barsey. My illustrious predecessor, a guy named Rudra had given Lakhpa a hard time in their painful surveys together. Lakhpa had remembered Rudra so much that his first serious advice before setting off for the first field trip was "Listen sir, the red panda only lives in the most inaccessible areas, so you can not expect this search to be a routine hike !" I assured him that my plans were also along similar lines and started exploring the great mist-laden oak-rhododendron forests.

For the next five days as we went up and down, barged through bamboo clumps, I created some spectacular falls and slides which must have thoroughly entertained Lakhpa, my respect for him only grew. He was responsible for all of my entry-point knowledge regarding Barsey and most definitely its flora. These initial days were fascinating indeed, when a kind of jungle unseen and unheard of was slowly revealing its magic to me.

Lakhpa left in the middle as the department had left some more urgent official chores for him and re-joined again when I was camping at Hilley, near the sanctuary check post. Then for the last five days we again had some footloose fun which included an intense religious(!!!!!) discussion with an SSB officer camped in the paramilitary camp in Hilley who was looking for some company to have rum with. Evidently I impressed him with my deep knowledge of the purans and the rituals because we were invited for breakfast in the camp next morning!!. Every afternoon the sky would turn deep grey and it would start pouring like  the biblical flood. This was my first brush with North-East monsoon and though it was almost overwhelming , we were not bored. The single electronic gadget that I had carried (For some astonishing reason, I was not issued a camera from the office), a portable radio was keeping us company. As me and Lakhpa watched the rain pound the surrounding earth from the safety of the single room near the forsst check post, we discovered that if the receiver was kept at a certain position with the aerial pointing towards a certain angel, we were getting through to FM-Rainbow(Sikkim's own FM channel days were a long long way away then). Thsoe sometime morose songs were the perfect background score to the rain as we chatted and joked and I found out that Lakhpa Tenzing was a total softioe when it came to his family. Taking a bath for those 12 days were obviously out of the question for me and Lakhpa watched with disbelief everyday as I used water only for the most basic necessities, his image of neat and clean Bengalis getting getting shattered in the process. He had started by requesting me to "bathe" myself in the starting days, which came down to "curing" myself near the tenth day.

The next time Lakhpa and me got together was in the more civilised and comfortable confines of his own hgome in Okhrey, one of the fringe villages of Barsey. Me and PD, the other old friend from Barsey, were going around in the fringe villages and asking all sorts of strange questions abour red pandas and the likes. Okhrey being one of my target areas, where better to stay than in Lakhpa's house! It was then that I discovered Lakhpa Tenzing's equally nice family; a loving family and the cutest little girl I had ever seen. The meeting was the next day, but before that it we had eating, and what an expedition it was trying to find a chicken for dinner! Lakhpa scoured the entire village for a household willing to part with some poultry. Just about when the no hope point of which, magically LT got hold of someone who knew someone and we had a chicken dinner!

After that survey in 2008, my frequent contacts with Lakhpa were frequent no more. As my focus of work also shifted from being a field biologist to someone who tried his hand at almost everything. We were somehow in touch though as Barsey was a place where WWF was involved every now and then with some program or other. Everytime I bumped into him, it seemed like old times and we picked up from where we had left off. Possibly from late 2009, I kept hearing about LT's long term illness which was making it really difficult for him to continue active field duty.  We had a excursion planned for some students in mid 2010 in Barsey, going for which we met LT in a very frail state. Though his smile had not vanished , he looked terribly sick and said had it was possibly hepatitis, going by the doctor's suspicions. I felt terrible looking at him coughing and walking away painfully when our vehicles finally sped past Okhrey.

After that there was a lull as I got busy again in a myriad of things. The monsoons came and went, the skies cleared up and the winter chill at athat altitude was almost killing. It was December and after ages I was back surveying in Barsey, this time accompanied with a new set of colleagues and cutting edge technology in camera traps. LT was supposed to accompany us and I was really looking forward but then his frail health had other ideas. He could not join us and though disappointed, i forgot everything in the comong few days amidst the excitement lived allover again. One day as we were making our way down in the main Hilley-Barsey trail, I saw a mixed bag of people coming up. It was a highly official team of Forest department officials including the ACF, Tourism Department Officials and Lakhpa who looked totally like being dragged from bed. After the pleasantries were exchanged, the team trudged on and Lakhpa waved a thin smile and expressed his sadness at not being able to join us tor this leg of the survey. We assured him to get well first and watched him trek up laboriously in the backdrop of the mist and the ancient oaks of Barsey-his second home.

Identifying occasions which were particularly momentous for either good or bad reasons have always been a problem for us so little did I know that the above meeting was the last one where I would see Lakhpa Tenzing walking in Barsey, or anywhere. The chilling news came in this April which caught my by its severe bluntness and impact. Lakhpa Tenzing never made it past his initial bout with Hepatitis. All the small and otherwise mundane memories flashed in my mind which balked in taking measure of the loss. Eventually, the realisation sunk in that we won't see Lakhpa Tenzing with Barsey or vice versa.

Among all the places you make friends, "jungle" friends are the most treasured kinds. Unbound by false pretensions, showing off  and all the artificial excesses that the more intellectual spheres have, these people bond with you immediately , expect very little in return and share their wealth of knowledge only if you want to learn. Lakhpa Tenzing wa such a store house of knowledge regarding Barsey and wildlife in general. Above and beyond the fact that his demise was an irreparable loss for the forest department, I lost my first jungle friend in Sikkim. I am sure this year the rhododendrons of Barsey bloomed at their best bloom ever.

In honour of the one who got away.

  I do not remember who the author was. I can not remember even the magazine’s name. All I remember is that I had read it in my childhood and it was about a sal leaf.

The sal leaf had its oigin in ..well..a sal tree. The tree itself was in a great and ancient sal forest by a clear blue river. Every day the dawn would light up the leaf and cast its shadow on the ground. The leaf felt warmed in the winter months and scorched in the summer afternoons. Still, there was nothing to complain. The evening breeze would caress the leaf and its friends and they would appreciate with a tiny chorus of murmurs. The leaf could look at the river and watch the mirrored sunset.

Then, after some months someone came and plucked the leaf like sal leaves are plucked for making a number of things. After an obscure journey which seemed like an eternity, the leaf found itself in the cart of a streetfood vendor in a dusty congested town. It did not have sufficient time to cope with the shock though. Business was good for the vendor and the sal leaf met a predictable end in the nearest drain after its purpose was served.

There, lying among the heap of garbage, all the leaf could hope for was a breeze, a strong breeze, like the breeze from that blue river. The breeze could help it levitate and land somewhere else, anywhere. But in that scorching heat and clouds of vehicular emissions, nothing came to the leaf’s help.

It then quietly resigned itself to its fate and kept laying there, thinking about yesterday and that great whispering forest and the blue river.

I remembered the story long after I had forgotten all about the source and the age I had read it first. Then in the middle there was another leaf, well a bunch of leaves to be exact. This time it came from National Geographic, during one of their 15 sec preludes or promos of a series. It showed a bunch of leaves slowly gliding down towards a forest floor in greyscale. I somehow liked that inconsequential ad and thought I had always liked falling leaves.

Much much later, in hindsight during one of those moments where there was nothing else to think of, I had thought about the two different leaves. Longer I thought, more it dawned on me that they were not dissimilar at all. The sal leaf had only memories and the falling leaf had no conscious control over its path and did not know what awaited it on the ground. Then I realized that most of my life, I have been running away from becoming either of them.

But, like they say, the things you resent have strange ways of catching up with you. So I see them staring at me quite often. The disenchanted sal leaf and the free-falling leaf.

The boy who roamed in sal forests

The boy who roamed in Sal forests..

We were there for two days and I was already experiencing an acute sense of déjà vu. Think of mountain forests in Sikkim and the most probable picture in your mind would consist of lush, dripping wet vegetation, gurgling streams and mist covered hills. While three years of roaming has given me enough entry-level experience of the above topography, there still exists a different landscape which I have rarely explored.

On a visual scale, its quite different. Tall, mammoth trees dominated by that champion of the lowland forests, Sal, dry and brown soil carpeted by dry leaf litter, dry serpentine trails going into the depths of this dry landscape where even the general jungle smell was of the dry kind. The incessant wind only brought great applauds from the Sal, Panisaaj and Chilaune but no rain. Clear nights framed the moon against a background of dark sentinel like trees which only made the déjà vu even stronger.

We were in Sumbuk in South Sikkim, probably one of the driest parts of the state and clothed by lowland mixed-sal forests and adjoining the only bird sanctuary in the state, Kitam. It had been two days since we were going out with a very small group of semi-reluctant school boys and school drop-outs, trying to teach them the fine art of bird watching, grooming them for an unlikely future scenario where they might become bird-guides. On a satisfaction scale, the training was shaping out to be a disappointment with less than half of promised participation and organizers who had the faintest idea how to organize things.

However, neither me nor Basant were complaining. The outings gave us ample chances to explore this unfamiliar landscape, make enough noises while crunching the leaf litter and going down in the valley and yet come across birds we hardly got to see higher up. Compared to the high mountain forests where you hear a bird rather than seeing it nine out of ten times, this was really a walk in the park. Though we were planning to wrap the program sooner than expected, these few days were rich in the daily wanderings, evenings with whiskey and philosophical discussions and after-dinner walks.

It was a unique world indeed. Mornings started with out of place cries of peafowls (Peacocks are not native to Sikkim, a small group was introduced from UP long time back. Most of them found a stronghold in the present region.). We got to see brilliant, familiar yet long forgotten displays of peacocks in the roadside fields. People stared at us with an extreme laidback gaze sitting in their porches as we made our way down the blacktop which snaked its way down, dissecting the sal tracts. Surprises awaited us in the trail down the river valley with cackling hill mynas, fleeting glimpses of maroon orioles, flashing long tailed broadbills and yet many more. Evenings brought in strong winds which were unanimously greeted by the trees. Small swirls of dusts settled on the road after allowing the fallen leaves to perform weightless acrobatics. The after dinner walks were magical with the moon playing hide and seek between the canopy, all-drowning silence broken by the wind and screech of an owlet. The mountains on the other side of the great Rangeet, incidentally falling in West Bengal, were lit up by patches of intense forest fires which were burning incessantly, day and night.

The feeling I was getting in these two days was hard to put down in words. All of it seemed new to me, yet I was totally at home. Through the daily walks, sights, sounds and smells, I was experiencing a new kind of joy which surprised me by their suddenness and inexplicable nature. The happiness transcended to my “teaching” sessions where I probably spoke an extra paragraph each time, sometimes ignoring the tortured faces of the trainees. There was something missing, something to be deciphered, and something to be analyesd and felt happily familiar about. All of it was clear when I met the boy who roamed in sal forests.

He was someone who had come to Sikkim for the first time all the way from Delhi. He was completing his masters’ dissertation here, from some college in Delhi. ( My fragile memory failed me once again, sorry, Zahir.). Young, wide eyed and humble, Zahir was staying in one of the houses and collecting data about practically everything related flora and fauna. Though his topic was choice was strange (Something to do with the “quantification of biodiversity and ecotourism potential”) and seemed more apt for a PhD rather than a masters’ thesis, I was hardly cynical. He seemed so familiar and eager that I practically wanted to share most of my knowledge with him. On his part, he also took an instant liking to us and accompanied us in some of our daily outings.

Zahir was close to wrapping up his data collection part, having roamed around for the last two months. He got along really well with the locals and had found a fan following in a young boy named Biswajit. He was incidentally one of our trainees and definitely the most eager one. In our first outing with the trainees, we were literally shocked with this kid who knew many of the birds already and the places to spot them. Then we found out that for the last two months, Biswajit had accompanied Zahir in his daily roamings in the sal forest and that his knowledge came from his guru, whom he was practically hero-worshipping.

On our last day in Sumbuk, Zahir missed the morning trip as he had to enter some long pending data in his laptop. However, after we were back, had lunch and were about to go for another late afternoon stroll, he turned up. Together we went, left the road and climbed up on one of those leaf-covered trails which entered the upper part of the village. The afternoon suddenly turned deep grey and it seemed the entire landscape was waiting for something which was eluding it for a long long time. A greater flame-backed woodpecker gave out its shrill cry and perched on a Paanisaj close to us. Trying in vain to photograph it in the fading light, Basant suddenly felt the first drop making its way through the canopy. Within minutes, it started to rain hard with big drops hitting the leaf litter and the road below and bringing up strange wafts of vapour. The parched soil welcomed the downpour with intense smell of soaked earth which practically left me rooted to a spot trying to inhale some more.

The rain only got heavier in the meantime and we had to run down the trail and then along the road to our homestay. Zahir left us to drop again in after sometime when we had dried ourselves and were sitting in the verandah enjoying the rain and the power cut.
He wanted my suggestion about his future course and I encouraged him for further research and told him to come back to this part of the world to hone his skills.

On our farewell morning we did a drive and a walk down to the valley to two of our friends who had joined us from Gangtok the night before. After the cursory goodbyes were over and the trainess were given last words of wisdom, our vehicle came to life and after cruising for 500 meters , found Zahir hurriedly coming towards us. He wanted to give a final wave off like the others and we shook hands from inside the vehicle and I wished him all the best.

As the vehicle sped away from the boy who roamed in sal forests, I suddenly had a revelation. It was all clear, why he had seemed so familiar in a landscape which was even more familiar. He reminded me so much of an eager young boy who also roamed in sal forests some four years back in the foothills of Western Himalayas. The boy who was awestruck every moment by the splendor, sights and sounds of the world famous jungles made famous by Jim Corbett. The boy has been forced to grow up since then and accept certain painful things as ways of the world but still has not lost the sense of wonder. I saw myself in Zahir’s eyes and felt ever more alive. May he roam many many more sal forests in the years to come and absorb all he can from the great teachings that nature has to offer.

All the best, Zahir!

I have stood amongst the neon lights of that country only once, have driven in the tarmacs in that country only once, but there have been numerous strange almost comical instances where I have crossed over the boundary in more primeval settings.

September, 2007
Three days into our second high-altitude trek in Arunachal, the landscape was beginning to turn absolute desolate and stunning. We had camped inside a natural rock shelter by the side of a huge lake the previous day. The air was thick with mist and scent of the Rhododendron bushes all along the fringe of the lake. This morning, to save time from going via the circuitous yak-routes, we climbed the murderous slope by the lake side and kept on climbing higher and higher till the lake below seemed like an emerald speck. Treeline ended soon and at around fifteen and a half thousand feet, the landscape resembled a martian surface with table sized boulders strewn allover and only some hardy moss carpeting the scree. Dripping sweat and trying to jump from boulder to boulder, I came across one of the most extraordinary high altitude plants. From a distance, it almost resembled a man wearing a bright rain jacket and hunching over. Giant Rhubarb, at five feet tall with bright yellow alien huge petal like things neatly arranged in a pedestal, was a shocking contrast in the drab desolate landscape. Having had my fill posing with this anomaly of botany, I trudged along and soon found myself standing on a ridge top from where I could see five lakes down below. One was emerald green, one absolute aquamarine, two ruddy brown and one eluded description. If this was in the middle of nowhere, I did not want to be anywhere else.

While the first and almost two-week long trek had taken our motley crew near the Tibet border to a fantastic valley called Potok, I had no idea where this trek was ending. Lungpo-Muchat Community Conserved Area, second one in our CCAs to be surveyed, stretched all the way to Bhutan but instead of taking the more traditional yak routes, we were cross-cutting across trails and trekking along seldom-traveled paths all the while to save time. And we were in a hurry to wrap this trek up. Pijush Da, our Arunachal WWF guy had some other assignments and I had to go back to Sikkim.

The end result was that among the huge contingent of guides and porters, even the most senior one, a guy with ancient creases allover his face and ancient wisdom sparking in his eyes, had only gone on this “shortcut” route only once and needed some consulting in deciding the next stretch. It was raining most of the times but still nothing could stop me from being awestruck in my first true-high altitude trek.

The next tow days also passed along in this awestruck daze. We encountered a fleeting Himalayan Thar, I got extreme close-up shots of a group of 15 blood pheasants, the trail crossed a huge 45 degree dripping wet shiny slope which we had to be almost carried across. The last stop was a small crumbling yak-herder shed (The grand old man must have decided this is as far he had gone) with spectacular views all around. The distant hills with the icing-sugar like first snow of the season, were Bhutan, I was told.

The return trek was no less interesting but there would be another time to elaborate on them. The most interesting part of this piece happened long after I was back in Sikkim. While trying to plot our route in Google Earth with our collected GPS points, Pijush Da had a somewhat startling revelation. I got a phone call from him telling that according to Google, we had halted well within Bhutan in our last stretch!! Obviously with a place like we had been to with absolute no human settlements and only very occasional army patrols, no discernible and demarcated boundaries exist. To add to the doubts, Google Earth has its own fallacies in depicting international borders but I hardly gave them a thought. It was magical to think that unknowingly, we had stepped into another country and spent the night there!

Google might have rectified its Indo-Bhutan boundaries by now but I would still consider it as my first brush with Bhutan.



January, 2008
Early winter in the dense subtropical jungles of Pangolakha, the famous sanctuary near the WestBengal-Sikkim-Bhutan tri-junction in East Sikkim. The third camp was pitched at a strange place with a stranger name called Line dara (Probably because of the water pipeline supplying the villages lower down). Like Arunachal, we had a big contingent of porters but the survey was more focused, searching for signs of the elusive fire-cat, the red panda.

This had been only a middle-elevation trek but no less interesting. We had lost our way surveying in smaller groups twice in the previous days. There was a place called Nunthale, our second camp, where all four surveying groups had lost their way and returned quite late. Though not presenting with any difficulties coming with a high-altitude trek, surveying was still tough because of dense vegetation, trails overgrown with weeds and because the damn red panda only loved the most impenetrable bamboo forests.
However, the star of the show definitely had been Tara Daju, a pocket sized ex-hunter turned conservation enthusiast and someone who by his own admission, knew these jungles like the back of his hand. However, on the previous day only, while guiding me uphill a dense slope to reach a pokhri, Tara Daju reached the ridge top, stood with his fingers tapping his chin and after five minutes of introspection said, it seems like the pokhri has moved!!

By reaching Line Dara, we were very near to the Bhutan border. “It is just in the ridge top above our camp”, mentioned Tara Daju. After the mobile pokhri, I was a little suspicious of his estimates but we would be finding out nest morning only, as our planned survey route would take us directly near the supposed border.

Next morning after a hurried breakfast of rice and onions, we started on the exhausting vertical slope like a strange traveling theatre group with people of all shapes, sizes, ages and mobility. Tara Daju’s smile soon was there however as he finally recognized the trails with conviction. We neared the ridge top, passed through an amazing natural bamboo tunnel, found some fresh red panda scats and then came to a sort of level ground.

Lying there was a huge ancient tree trunk with an arrow etched over the bark pointing to the other side of the ridge. “This is it” Tara Daju said, with an air of finality. This was it?? I felt quite strange. 15000 feet at Arunachal, one would not expect barb wires and bunkers but this was just a day’s trek from the nearest roadhead! Inspecting the tree trunk further, I found that this really was it. Somebody had etched “BHUTAN” in smaller fonts just below the arrow. The ridge, the jungle and people just down from the ridge were in a separate country! I got a strange feeling again. The trip was completed with formally crossing the border and posing inside foreign soil.



October, 2008
This started my love affair with North Bengal and Doors, which would last for the next five months but would get me hooked for life. We were about to kick start my famous Tiger Conservation Plan work in Buxa- Jadapara however it was still the planning phase. Dr. Johnsingh, the grand old veteran of Indian Wildlife Research had been flown in from Bangalore and he, along with me, my boss and the top Forest Department honchos were supposed to pen down (or key down) the plan for the months to come.

Buxa was still an alien territory for me but I liked it already. Along with the daily excruciatingly boring discussion sessions, we were having some field trips where the Field Directors and Deputy Field Directors were eagerly showing off “their” areas. It was during one of these trips, traveling with a car full of old men that I came to Sankosh, a forest range near the famous river with the same name.

Sankosh was mesmerizing with a huge, wide gurgling flow of blue water and distant blue mountains. The pastures and hills on the other side, I was told, were in Assam and Manas was not too far! Trying to grasp this fact, I suddenly remember that Sankosh supposedly had the West Bengal-Assam-Bhutan tri-junction too. I thought of asking about the Bhutan border but then did not for some reasons. The query was answered shortly,however on our way back. Though I don’t remember now whether we were going back directly or had taken a small detour, the fact remains that’s on this wide road flanked by dense mixed deciduous jungles, we came across a strange stone structure.

It was by the side of the road, around 2 feet tall and shaped like an upside-down bowl. From a distance it had seemed like we had chanced upon a half buried Trycerotops egg!. The mystery was soon solved by one of the Forest Officers and he revealed that it was the West Bengal- Bhutan border. No inscriptions of any kind, a stranger might come to place a million times and still not get the fact that he was crossing into another country. However, what was border was border and so we drove back after a while after almost erasing the foreign soil marker in our vehicular emission.




December, 2008

My feet had almost walked a hundred kms of Buxa soil by then, second month into my tiger sign surveys. These days were a déjà vu of the Corbett times, living alone, planning alone and enjoying alone. The entire Buxa Tiger Reserve shares its northern boundary with Bhutan and a very small part of Assam, so it was no surprise that surveying would eventually land me up near the border and may be slightly beyond. And it did, many times. Out of those encounters, a couple is more memorable than other for some reasons.

I woke up in that small classroom bench along with my two partners from the forest department. The classroom benches in that ancient primary school were only of average size and I had to assume a fetal position to support my width. Somehow the small FM receiver was on during the entire night and now it was cheerfully airing bhajan after bhajan.

It was a bright blue morning in Chunabhati, lying on a hill between the roadhead at Santrabari and the Butan border at top. We had trekked up from Santrabari the day before and had slept in the classroom for lack of any other accommodation. The inhabitants of Chunabhati, mostly Dokpas (A fact again indicating the proximity with Bhutan) were supposedly very wary of strangers and it was only because of my companions being friendly with many of the houses that we were given co-operation.

A fabulous breakfast of rice and pork cooked only with red chillies and oil later, we were starting on the winding trail leaving the village, entering the jungle and climbing all the way to the border and beyond. Gradually with gaining altitude, the vegetation started to change slowly and at one point my GPS read almost 6000 feet! The area was almost identical to similar areas in Sikkim, dense, moist, with rolling mists and a profound variety of trees and shrubs. I was thinking no tourist coming to the other familiar places of Buxa would ever believe such a place exists. We were in a tight schedule however, so I could not spend much time there and had to trudge along.

Eventually we reached pukhri, a small seasonal pool which was now all but dried up. The staff had found tiger pugs here during the last year’s census but obviously the tiger (or whatever) had not kept the appointment this time. What I had failed to notice till then was a small pillar like structure nearby. Nobody had to tell me what it meant and I came to know that the nearest settlement in Bhutan was just down the ridge and the roadhead was also nearby. The urge to just climb down to the Bhutan road for the heck of it was very strong but it was already afternoon. We had a long hike back to Buxa duar this time so I had to leave the place and the now mist covered pillar quite soon.

A couple of days later, we were getting ready for another expedition, this time a full on camping trip with tents and porters. From Lapchakha, a knee-wobbling descent and we reached the wide Katlung river. The plan was to hike upstream, camp and survey a stretch where staff had seen tiger pugs last year. Katlung was coming down from Bhutan, so I knew upstream meant nearer to the border.

The entire valley had boulders and gravel of myriad hues and spectacular colour combinations. In places with sulphur rich sediments, the soil was bright yellow and the surrounding boulders were deep grey, almost blue. Though the gravel meant chances of finding an imprint were almost nil, I was enjoying like anything. We hiked, waded through the knee deep water at some places, jumped from boulder to boulder and finally reached our camping grounds. We had to camp there as there was a scarcity of level ground either upstream or downstream.

A very narrow patch of gravel by the river and slightly inclined towards it so our tents seemed almost sloping down from a distance. Ration was bought from Buxa duar and our cooks started about their work only to have an interesting revelation immediately. We had bought everything apart from something which the chefs always advise “to taste”-plain old salt! After the blame game, one poor porter was sent in the fading light to fetch some from a cattle shed which we had seen at least a couple of miles downstream.

The others got around to some interesting work in the meantime, serious fishing. A small stream like portion was partially dammed with rocks, boulders and what-nots, the staff moved around like pond herons, snatching fish from the shallow pool! Despite my initial suspicion about the effectiveness, it worked like anything! Within a couple of hours, we had mugs and pots full of small prawns, carp-like fishes and an army of catfish like things with bottom suckers!

The salt-seeker had come back by then and the chulah was in full swing. Some of those strange almost catfishes were crisp-fried and served to us as another Bhutan link was giving us company- a bottle of black mountain whiskey. Glasses obviously were in a shortage, so some bamboo containers were improvised from the jungle in the backside. The full moon night, gurgling river and the breeze it brought, embers from the wood fire and the Bhutan Spirit with the Bhutan hills at the backdrop-everything was perfect about that night and it has been forever etched in my memory. After my companions had retired inside the tent, I stayed up for sometime just listening to the river, sitting by the dying fire.

Next morning the real survey began after breakfast and we hiked further and further upstream. Like it happens in all mountain streams, further upstream you go, bigger the boulders become and the slope gradually rises and so it was happening. After a couple of hours, we came across the spot where the last census had seen success. Amazingly, near a heavily disturbed patch by a cattle trail, there were some very old scats which got eyes fixed to them. Though old, they were still intact enough to show that the defecator had been bigger than a leopard. Yay!! Success at last and my first confirmed tiger sign in Buxa! After almost clicking 20 photos, we went a little further upstream and came across this truck sized boulder in the middle of the riverbed with strange inscriptions.

Along with many lines written in Tibetan script, there was an untidily written “Bhutan” near a strange sketch of a human form wearing something like a spacesuit. My companions had obviously seen this before and told me that this was it. So it was, nothing, stone bowl, stone pillar and now a boulder. The man in the stone almost seemed smiling and glad at our success. So I gave a final look to the hills across the border and started back, a happy and elated soul.




March, 2009

The most “civilized” of the encounters. Time found me this time in Jaldapara, having completed my surveys during the past month and a half. It had been an awesome time, following Torsha through the yellow grasslands, surveying on elephant back and the occasional booze sessions with Niranjita Di. During a free day, we found ourselves on a leisurely trip to Phuntsoling, the famous town across the Indo-Bhutan border at Joygaon. Amitabha Da, an acquaintance of Niranjita Di was visiting and he was keen on making the trip and we also did not want to waste the opportunity. In the end, we traveled in Niranjita Di’s vehicle only and soon reached Joygaon. Now this was a border town if ever there was one. Shops, people from almost everywhere, hotels, presence of security personnel and a proper check post.

Some minutes later, we were past the check post, crossed the huge gate saying Phuntsoling and touched down in foreign soil! Amitabha da was like a kid in a candystore and after getting down, he literally started to going to all shops including candystores. We strolled around downtown Phuntsoling, went to a nearby monastery, posed away to glory and bought some knick-knacks from the shops all having “phoreign” brands.

As I stood near the intersection with bright lights all around me and expensive SUVs buzzing past, I somehow remembered all the previous brushes with this dragon country. Seemed like I hade made a full circle and could write a book on “How to enter Bhutan”

However, like all travelers, it feels stupid to put a final word on any journey, especially as long and as varied as this one. The wind blows across the hills and the across the border and the rucksack awaits another encounter with a different kind of border.

I might eventually get an opportunity to leave the surface totally and fly to Bhutan for some vague official work. However, what fun would that be?