Wandering the hilly and sylvan Land of Nyishi – one of the biggest tribes in Arunachal Pradesh – can bring you all sorts of increaqdible encounters. Just step off the beaten paths, cross the jungle, climb the faraway hills – and meet all these fabular people in their usual rural settings. Be sure – you will be the first foreigner they ever meet. We, actually, were!
Nobody knows what is a saw here. So they just take their knives and their daos (Asian type of machete, a mixture of a sword and a knife, for cutting paths in the jungle) and cut their doors from whole tree trunks. This takes really big effort!
Just after the breakfast we made a discovery. Trying to cut through the jungle with no path would be a bad idea, so we returned to the path junction, where our sylvan friends turned yesterday. We expected to find anything there – a hut, a field or some fishing spot – but a real manufactury! Here, in the middle of jungle!
So we deepened into the Jungle, wandering who could have cut this marvelous smooth path up here?
The answer came soon and quite unexpected: just as we stopped for a rest break, a strange cavalcade of halflings caught up with us. The tiny people were barefooted, carried huge wooden logs on their backs and were absolutely not scared away by our gloomy looks with huge backpacks.
In a nutshell: Expedition to the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. First descent of the Subansiri River, jungle trekking expedition to isolated tribes of Arunachal and Tibetan-speaking Memba tribes.
Interactive map of the expedition
Routes of both parts of the expedition – the rafting part and the trekking part – are mapped here. The map shows milestones – our camps, villages, locations of emergency events.
The map also hosts pictures made in expedition. The more you zoom the map, the more pictures will appear on it.
Key to lines and symbols on the map:
– yellow lines – moving on a motor vehicle
– green lines – trekking in jungle
– blue lines – rafting down Subansiri on catamarans
– white semitransparent lines – heave gauge transportation: airplanes, train, bus
– settlements
– expedition camps
– locations of the smaller catamaran collapse and of the bigger catamaran overkeels