North East Diary | Day-4 | Walong to Digboi

We have breakfast, and it was good. Vaibhav asks the care taker of the circuit house “Sir, I am a tour operator. I will be bringing tourists here in the future. Can you please give me your telephone no., so that I can reserve this accommodation?” That guy says, “Saab, there is no mobile signal here. And we don’t know our land line no. it is used by the Govt. officials to call and inform us that they are coming. Hence only they know this number. We never use this phone. Moreover, even if you book any room any day, and if any Govt. officer is coming on that day, then your booking will be cancelled and the room will be given to them. So there is no point in booking. Simply come, if there is any vacant room, then I will give it to you.” Frankly speaking, this statement holds good for all the Arunachal Pradesh Govt. managed lodges, inspection bungalows, circuit houses etc. So one has to depend on luck or be ready for the worst circumstances. Because, at many places, there is no place to sleep also.

There is one more point. Supposing you get some place to sleep, then you will only be getting the place, but you won’t have things like bed sheets, toilets etc. So without proper tourism facilities it is difficult to visit these remote places.

Now we start from Walong and take the same route back. Of course, there is no other route. Today the journey is little bit faster as we have already seen the place and took photos on our onward journey. We stop at Hayuliang for a cup of tea, and by 1.30 pm we reach Udayak Pass. This is one of the highest passes in this route and it’s at a height of 5400 ft. after taking few photos, we move towards Parashuram Kund. Mid way, we come across “Lohit View Point”. From here we can see the Lohit flowing in the plains. And if we are lucky enough, on a clear sunny day we can see the Lohit joining the Brahmaputra. The Lohit, which is just one or two hundred meters wide at many stretches in the valley, will spread out and the width is more than 3 to 4 kilometers in this part!

We reach Parashuram Kund, take our lunch and proceed further. We come across a place called “Wakro”, from where a left turn can take us to “Deban”. Deban is the place from where we have to start our trek in Namdapha. We are very sure that it will cut down our time, distance etc. but nobody knows any detail about that route. And there is no one to answer our query. Also, as this route is not available in any maps, we we’re not aware of this and thus were ill prepared. So we proceed to Tinsukia as per our scheduled plan, and take a left turn here towards Digboi. This is NH 38, and is in very good condition. We can notice more traffic in this road.

Vaibhav tried his good links to accommodate me in a tea estate at Digboi. It was Krishna Tea Estate, managed by Mr. Umesh Tyagi, as friend of Vaibhav’s father. It is a 300 hectares tea estate, employing around 750 employees in total. We were their guests for the night. As it was night, we could not see anything. We had a lovely chat with them for a couple of hours. The food offered by the couple was really fantastic, that too at a very short notice and at around 9 pm. We were extremely grateful to them and called it a day.