“If you happen to travel in Kheng, one of the remotest hamlets in the east where the tales of snowman (Yeti) is headline, forget not to be equipped with hammer and crowbar which not necessarily mean to be used as self defense weapon against the mystic beast but to clear the stones obstructing your way to that virgin land. It’s just a travel guide to all those travelling in those lands of snowman. It took me many days for Facebooking this post not because that I was in queue for my turn to have it be approved by Mark Zuckerberg but it’s because of the fresh art of air networking who has forgotten the soil. In search of it, I had a tough battle waving my cell phone to and fro from the peaks which are far above the ground and roofed by thick clouds alike that realm in Avatar.
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| Fig: Breaking Boulders To Clear Road |
By now, I’m in no doubt that the person reading this article has got the clear picture of it for I’ve been making an effort in the earlier paragraph to introduce the atmosphere of the place chosen as my subject. So, let me ride you in the land of snowman by the vehicle of my words. The journey began from warm broadleaved woods of Lingmithang, Mongar, in the early noon. I removed my top, opened the glass of a pickup truck, and sipped every fall of water from the bottle to battle against the burning midday sun. Someone familiar to the place would say that my statement of the day as ‘burning’ is an exaggeration but for me it was a day in Sahara desert since for years I’m living in a place with height not less than 2000 meter above the sea level. So, if a yak is brought in lowlands she has no option than to shave her hairs.
Allow me not sidetrack my topic, and say that before the downpour we arrived at the raised grounds of cool broadleaved jungle. As a technical person, I was not pleased to see the road in some places with alignment more than 8 degree but nevertheless it was not for the first and will not be the last to travel through such roads for there would be state of affairs in many places that force in engineering such alignments. With tons of goods mainly salts and beverage, our pickup truck had a hard-hitting climb through the steep road, and the condition went downhill with the start of drizzle from the blue. All of sudden, he the driver had no picking then to put on the brakes in the middle of climbing only to find that half the road is covered by mud and boulders. Clearing the way did not help as he lost the pickup of the motion, and the more he short of to the clutch, the more smell it gave. Having the clutch pad worn-out, we had to dial for help and then in the hours of darkness shift ourselves to another pickup truck. It was sickly sweet to have ourselves buried from the downpour by blue tarpaulin. I heard the pullets, smelled the drinks and feel the arctic hands of my mates in search of things they dropped in the dark, but didn’t know where I was. At last the long bumpy journey ended when the clock stroke 12:30 AM. It was start of a new date during which we closed our eyes only to wake up late in the morning.
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| Fig: Beautiful Silambi Hamlet |
Daybreak was not good with heavy downpour, so we called off our program. Two of us, me and my host Ranger went to the inn as to have ourselves warmed from the frosty weather. Those goods which I saw on the shelf inside the inn took days to reach their destination in the past years but now with roads being linked, I can free myself from paying extra prices for the beers we had. But every plus has its shortcoming, and the road here could be misused to break the virgin woods of those tall peaks in very illegal style. The snowman which the men of that soil gossip to have cried at nightfall, if are true, may die out if the woods are harvested in titanic amount. Let me not put in writing on about snowman because in upcoming days I’m going to write a detail story on it, and for now I’m just introducing no more than the place.
The place of my paper is most of the time in cloud and rain. Those days in the cloud gave me a strong push for to tweet the most famed Bhutanese lyrics ‘SAMO GI JABLEY EPP CHE EPP CHE…’ which, if translated means ‘hiding from behind the clouds’ but as I mentioned earlier the problem is with the slow internet service. The more days, the more drinks I may take because of wet and frosty day and therefore tried every best of myself to finish the survey the very next day. In the third day, I packed my gears, waved my hand and rode back in the same pickup truck to Mongar.
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| Fig: My survey crew members hiding from rain inside the cowshed |
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