BRAVING DECEMBER IN ARUNACHAL - 2

Day2 : Bomdilla (27th Dec)

Next day we started early morning to Bomdilla. As it rained throughout the night, the morning was quite cool, but still there wasn’t much ‘wintery’ feel to it. We driver whizzed pass through the empty roads of Tezpur & soon we were traveling through the forest area of the famous Kaziranga. Though it wasn’t in our tour itenary, we had a few free days, so we decided to make a small trip to Kaziranga if our budget permits. At around 10.30 we reached Bhalukpong – the entry point to Arunachal. We already had our permits made from Kolkata, so the checking process was brisk & quick. We had our breakfast there & also couldn’t refrain ourselves from a little on-road photo shoot.


Soon we sighted the snow clad peaks of ‘Sela’-through which we have to pass to enter the district of Tawang, but today our destination was the town of Bomdilla. The scenes of the roadside were quickly coming close to that of picture-perfectness as we entered Asia’s biggest Orchidarium at Tipi. The place wasn’t all that fussy & just a few officials and tourists were strolling here & there. But after entering the glass house, we knew that the reputation wasn’t a bit of exaggeration. We were spellbound by the sights of the orchid specimens & just by the beauty of the colorful flowers.

We also get to see the insect-eating Pitcher plant which stores sticky proteins in its flowers to catch & digest its preys.

We continued our journey towards Bomdilla and the temperature was falling steadily despite of the rising sun. We encountered many waterfalls & some picturesque valleys on our way forward. Though the time wasn’t adequate, we just couldn’t afford to miss the opportunity to miss clicking these sights & thus took many roadside pitstop to grasp these picture-perfect sceneries into our cameras.

We also visited the Nag temple on-route. At 5pm in the evening we reached Bomdilla & by now we were freezing. We checked into a hotel for the night. Again we went out to book car for further journey but then we realized that we had made a mistake. As it was year end & Bomdilla being a small town, almost all the cars were booked & whatever left were charging sky-high & that also for a round trip to Tawang & back. We could opt to go for share cars, but as we were to pass the most scenic points like Sela, we decided against it. Actually our plan was to book exclusive cars for the journey for one side, then to avail bus or shared taxis for our return journey. But that didn’t worked out, as in these treacherous roads buses were hard to come by, so we had to contact our travel agent back in Tezpur who was offering us a cheap package, to send car the next morning to Bomdilla for the rest of the Arunachal trip including a stay in Tawang & Dirang (2 nights – 3 days). He agreed but we were quite disoriented of extreme cold & to the fact that we were broke just in the second day of the journey. In the late evening we went out again shivering, to the market to buy some additional woolens & to have our dinner.

We came to know that this kind of sub-zero temperature wasn’t really common place in Bomdilla & it hardly ever snowed in there (We now realized that the heavy rain last night was the cause of this sudden chill) But today, the locals anticipated, could be that rare day of snow. We were thrilled at these chances, but the snowfall kept us waiting entire night, leaving us to crouch by the heater but it didn’t snowed.

Contd. In Later Parts ……

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