Arunachal's Thunder Road

A 10-day journey along the Trans-Arunachal Highway puts a writer’s driving to the test, revealing one surprising twist after another

- TANAY GOKHALE

For an enthusiastic driver, I haven’t undertaken many road trips, unless you count my silly daydreams of jettisoning my life to be a solitary, sleep-deprived trucker, roving along India’s twisting highways. So when a 10-day drive across Arunachal Pradesh presents itself, a glimmer of that fantasy seems to be within reach at last.

Large swathes of Arunachal Pradesh, despite its growing profile, are tourist-free. In the west, destinations such as Tawang, Dirang and Ziro now receive an annual trickle of backpackers, adventurers and music festival attendees, but the state’s eastern and central regions have been mostly inaccessible. All that is about to change with the Trans-Arunachal Highway, a project that has been carved through dense forests and steep mountain slopes, now nearing completion. And this drive, hosted by the state’s tourism board, is likely to be an arduous test of that epic 2,300-kilometre stretch.

While the journey is a pan-Arunachal one, photographer Mayank—my companion for 10 days—and I are only joining the convoy of travel writers and auto specialists for its central and eastern leg. We start from Namsai in the east, a pleasant three-hour trip from Dibrugarh in Assam. At night we stay at the family-run Hotel Arun Jivitta, opposite an almost Dickensian, solitary tea factory with a sheet metal roof, out of whose chimney billows black smoke behind an eerie compound wall.

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