NORTH EAST FESTIVITIES

Exploring the JK Tyre Orange Festival Of Adventure and Music

- BHUYAN CHOWDHARY

It's been more than a decade since I first laid eyes at Arunachal Pradesh while browsing for hard-to-reach places in India to ride through. Since then for some reason, a visit had been due to a point where obsessiveness for planning a tour had resulted in my acquaintances being brimmed to the nose where some even suggested to pay me to keep my mouth shut while travel plans were discussed. So when I received a call from JK Motorsport, naturally I was instantly up on my feet and halfway out of the door even before the call ended. From Pune where we are based, it would be a long 16-hour journey split between a three-hour cab ride to catch a flight to Delhi before landing at Dibrugarh, Assam and pushing onwards for another three hours by cab to the venue at Dambuk.

While you might consider a 16-hour domestic air journey to be quite arduous, Arunachal has actually become a lot more accessible these days. This remote state lying at the easternmost front of the country sharing borders with Bhutan, China and Myanmar has been undergoing a continuous overhaul where now there's a new airport and smooth flowing roads. But the biggest improvement that makes Dambuk and Arunachal Pradesh as a whole a lot more accessible are the network of bridges constructed over the mighty Bramhaputra river that cuts down travel time drastically.

Until a few years ago, the riverbeds were the natural path to reach Dambuk when the weather was dry and the water levels were low. During heavy rainfall, this remote Arunachali village remained virtually cut off from civilisation for almost eight months in a year, until recently when the government invested heavily in the infrastructure. Now this quaint little village at the foothills of the eastern Himalayan range is a mere three hour journey from the airport, which made it easier to reach the village.