TRAVEL FEATURE - INDIA ANTONIA BOLLINGBROKE-KENT
COME ON HERO , COME ON !
“
The road to Tawang is very bad , and very high ,” said one of the men watching the thin Assamese mechanic change my Hero ’ s battery . “ It not possible on this bike . It too old , and too small .”
“ This bike is going to get me to Tawang ,” I replied , slightly tetchily . “ I ’ ve been two thousand miles on it so far , and it ’ s done nothing wrong .”
Despite my retaliation , the naysayer did have a point . The former Tibetan town of Tawang sits , eyrie-like , in a mountainous cul-desac in the far corner of the Northeast Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh . Folded between the Tibetan and Bhutanese borders , and cut off for centuries from the outside world , now the only way to reach it is by the single 210 kilometre road that connects it with the rest of the subcontinent ; a road which crosses , at its highest point , the 4,175 metre Sela Pass . But even riding at 2,000 metres had deprived my Indianmade Hero Impulse ’ s 150-cc 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 .
From Bhalukpong , a scrappy town at the seam of mountain and plain , the road wound steeply upwards between sheer walls of jungle and the hurtling water of the Kameng River . Below , the mirror-flat plains of Assam fell away in an infinity of green . Now Buddhist prayer flags streamed between jerry-built roadside shacks and the people were stocky mountain folk with the weather-burned features of Tibet .
Soon the Hero was struggling . By 2,000 metres I was crawling up the switchbacks in first gear , slower even than the merrily painted trucks that rumbled past me in stinking clouds of smoke and dust . By the 2,700 metre Bomdila Pass we ’ d slowed
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