Land of the Dawn-Lit Mountains

ON AN UNSEASONABLY WARM October morning in Delhi that made me pine for the jungle encrusted hills of the northeast, I received a Facebook message from a British journalist and travel writer, Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent. Antonia was planning to travel through Nagaland and wanted to make a stop at the Tzu Valley, where I worked with local communities on a conservation project. I was intrigued when she mentioned she had written a book on her motorbike journey through Arunachal Pradesh—a land lately forgotten by the outside world, still bewilderingly wild and peopled by tribes with fascinating cultural and folkloric traditions, beliefs, and practices. Whose origins remain shrouded in mystery.

-  ANTONIA BOLINGBROKE-KENT SIMON & SCHUSTER

But Arunachal for me was a remembered land, one whose hills and trails I had wandered more than a decade ago, listening to tales of little people who left their footprints on the tops of mountains. Of unforgiving snakes, slithering across hills and valleys in search of those who had wronged them. Where I had watched shamans ritualistically slaughter pigs and chickens, reading their entrails for signs of the future. Whose forests and wildlife had taken my breath away. And it was where I had made friends for life.