Of childhood memories and more
Outlook Traveller|October 2021
The oldest was thirteen, the youngest six. a day of choices, resilience, strength, friendship and above all, survival, binds six kids on the (mis) adventure of their lives
Of childhood memories and more

IT WAS MY THIRD VISIT TO TAWANG, home to a tiny military base in Arunachal Pradesh.

The idyllic base was our home every summer, the only time in the entire year when we got to meet our father. A home away from home. A mystical, fantastical land with surreal weather conditions. The roads, if you could call them that, were narrower than a tick’s ass and precariously wound around an undulating row of mountains that looked like inverted ice-cream cones, topped with London Dairy’s vanilla ice cream. These stoic giants pierced through a sea of translucent cotton-candy clouds and, at 10,000 feet above sea level, Tawang might as well have been the land of fairies and elves where mythical beings and soldiers peacefully co-existed. It certainly was picture perfect, despite the daunting journey that led to it.

To my thirteen-year-old self, getting to Tawang seemed like Harry Potter’s journey to Hogwarts, liberally peppered with some edge-of-the-seat thrill of Mad Max: Fury Road. It started with a bumpy air-pocket-ridden flight to Guwahati that gave me giant knots in the stomach, followed by a two-day road trip that traversed Tezpur in Assam, ran through the picturesque Tenga Valley, crossing Bomdila Pass at 9,000 feet, slowly climbing up to the literally breathtaking Se-la Pass at 13,000 feet and finally descending into Tawang – ‘the land of the chosen horse’.

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