Arunachal Pradesh - The River Rush

The currents did not go easy on Anurag Mallick during his river rafting expedition on the siang. At the end of it, however, he felt like a new man

I’m too young to di…e,” the little voice of Oriel, the youngest member of our rafting group, quavered above the crash of waves as we negotiated the raging Siang. It may not seem like the ideal tourism tagline, but it was a worthy T-shirt slogan that captured the essence of adventure. As we were about to enter the rapids, I shot back at Oriel, “So am I!” The raft went full tilt and we hung on for our dear lives with the tenacity of a Mumbaikar on an evening local, barely surviving a potential spill. The Siang is one tricky river.

While approaching Dibrugarh by flight, the wide Brahmaputra river— chequered with sand banks and islets— shimmies by beguilingly. It’s hard to imagine that before charting a placid journey through the plains of Assam, the Brahmaputra is a tempestuous river in its upper tracts. Originating in Tibet where it’s called Yarlung Tsangpo (Xiang in Chinese), it flows gently eastwards through the Tibetan Plateau, cutting through the Great Himalayan Range past the ‘Great Bend’ around Namche Barwa, the highest unclimbed mountain in the world. Here, it turns sharply through a series of gorges and dashes down Arunachal as the Siang, before being joined by the Yamne, Lohit and Dibang to flow as the mighty Brahmaputra. The volume of water it carries from its lofty mountainous perch has earned it the title of ‘The Everest of Rivers’.