Brahmaputra - Deep and Immersive

 A few days back we had a most defining and immersive experience on a cruise on the Brahmaputra. This was my third cruise across the mighty river in this region.

 We started from Guijjan, a small hamlet near Tinsukia, at 7 am, in a small boat. Our destination was an area called Maili in the upper reaches of Brahmaputra where some wild horses had been sighted by forest people. The journey was supposed to take 4 hours.

 During the rainy season, junglee horses move around, as their original settlement around the Dibru Saikhowa national park is flooded.  The Dibru Saikhowa is fed by the Brahmaputra and Lohit and Dibru and an interlaced galaxy of small and big tributaries. Our boatman informed us that we were going towards the Siang (or Dihang, pronounced as Dehing) River, another of those distributing and feeding tributaries that weave in and out of the main river.

It was raining mildly and the boat ride itself was a joy and full of complexities from encountering riverine life and seeing it close-up. The Rangagora tea estate to the left was one of the first sights on the ride. There had been reports of feral horses sighting there a few days ago, which brought the horses to our mind and was the reason this trip. During heavy rains, the estate gets flooded and some portion of its massive main bungalow stands knee deep in water.

The boat ride seemed to be through one of the last of the remaining pristine areas of the country, wild and untouched. For miles there were just the flooded river banks, with uprooted or submerged trees, deep swathes of  greenery on the banks, with just the drongos, babblers, sparrows, swallows, kingfishers and sometime buffaloes, keeping the boat company.

The feral horses are apparently descendants from horses used by Britishers during the WW2.  A few of them escaped and their tribe has grown in the past 80 years to almost 79 horses. Of course, as in any rare species in India, they are endangered, with poachers and hunters looking for them to sell them as race horses or to resort owners.

As we went on, we came to the Laika village. It is mostly inhabited by the Mishing tribe. The entire village is on stilts with willow fences separating the houses. The residents use the river for all their activities. Boats, kids, fishermen, bathers and just watchers thronged the bank. The kids were adept at rowing and could be seen on boats and on the muddy field beyond the bank, playing. Many ran around with catapults using mud golis as stones. The houses had goats, cows, vegetable patches and most importantly solar panels to provide the much-needed light at night to keep away wild animals.

Speaking of wild animals, we heard an interesting tale from one of our forest guards about an old lady who was settled in these riverine wilds. Her kids moved away as they grew older but she refused to budge from her home. She was eventually trampled by a herd of elephants while she slept. Whichever area looked a bit destroyed, like trampled grasses, broken poles, solar panels, you knew elephants had been there! And our guide helpfully informed us that people didn’t die from common diseases like diabetes or cancer here. I guess wild elephants and snakes took care to keep the population under control!

As we progressed on our way upstream, we came across a huge banyan tree inland where there was a forest camp and which is a favourite with trekkers. My husband had done some trekking there with a friend, in the dry season, a few months earlier. It was huge and its canopy stretched on for acres.

In between there were forest watch towers and forest guard house boats, which accommodates around a dozen people, parked on the silty banks. One could see the silt and the bank falling off at many places and trees submerged in the partly flooded river. During full floods, the chapori (the riverine plain villages) are totally submerged and the inhabitants move to different areas, in fact they apparently move lowland as the silt gets deposited there!

We picked up a couple of fishermen who were walking upstream. They had their nets at a particular area, which apparently had some particular fish which sells at a huge premium in the market! Most locals moved around with a hatchet, to cut fishing ropes, brushes and bushes, I guess.

The boat got stuck at many mud flats and had to steered and had to steered and manoeuvred by hand and poles. The flats were many a times not visible in the flooded water. Our journey which was to take 4 hours finally ended up taking 5 hours!

Our biggest surprise was a couple of dolphins leaping up at us! We were totally unprepared to encounter the “Gangetic” dolphins which seemed to populate the area.

At 1 pm, after 5 hours of an eventful boatride we reached the Maili forest camp. The guards told us the horses had been sighted 2 days back. So we started on a trek in search of possible sighting of those elusive creatures. Along the way the couple of forest guards who had obligingly accompanied us enquired of fishermen about the possible whereabouts of the horses. After one hour of trekking through deceptive mud flats, brushes, fields, along the river bank, we reached a small hamlet. A couple of kids told us they had seen the horses in the morning at a distance, so we followed them for half a mile to the area where they had last seen the elusive creatures. Obviously they were not waiting for us! We trekked back to the, desolate, two and a half cottage, hamlet, had a round of tea in makeshift cups and from there proceeded to the boat.

5 hours of boat journey and 2 hours (5 miles) of trekking gave us an inside look into the Brahmaputra in Upper Assam like no other! The return journey took just 3 hours as we were going downstream.

Mighty is just one small adjective for the river. It is definitely mighty. And not just in width, breadth and length. It supports a humungous biodiversity that includes natural forest reserves, rare birds and plants, settlements along its bank, livelihoods for people in three countries, tribes that make a living solely out of it, water to the plains, a plethora of sub terranean life including the edible fish that is the staple diet of people whose life it touches and beyond.

I have given some maps to show the location of the Dibru Saikhowa National Park and the place I am talking about.

Dibru Saikhowa Map

Image Source - https://environmentandforest.assam.gov.in/information-services/national-park#dib

Image Source - 

https://upsccolorfullnotes.com/brahmaputra-river-and-its-tributaries/

A Bowl of Pakhala

Come March, the people of Odisha have to start battling the high and dry heat of an early summer that kind of side steps over what is supposed to be “Basanta Rutu” or Spring season; a season supposed to buffer the summer and be mild, but which slyly gives the state a miss. Summer is all of a sudden upon us, before we have even packed away our winter clothes. We start feeling the departure of winter when the vegetables, fresh beet and carrots and cauliflowers and laukis and peas suddenly start looking dry and withered, then one day suddenly lose their taste. Then comes the loo, the dry wind that the river bed brings in during the mid-day, that is suffocating and all pervasive. Suddenly the swarms of mosquitoes disappear and you know that the temperature is hovering around the 40s mark. But, the real indicator, that Summer is here? The Pakhala. The dish whose images have started doing the rounds of social media in recent years, and so much so, apparently, a day has been dedicated to it! (Whoever had heard of World Pakhala Day even 5 years back!)

Yes, the Pakhala truly heralds the coming of summer to Odisha. A dish, to quench thirst, egalitarian, all-inclusive and stubbornly resistant to change. It is also perhaps the only dish that people can digest in this small rice bowl of eastern India, during the hot season.

Pakhala – The Dish

What is a Pakhala? It is simply the leftover cooked rice dunked in water and taken the next day in its slightly fermented form. The fermentation gives it a kick and sour taste.  The daily wagers, the farmers who toil in the field, the working class, always in need of a fast nutritious dish, relish this simple unpretentious dish in the heat.  The basic Pakhala really doesn’t need much of an accompaniment, just some salt, maybe green chillies and some slices of raw onion. But the dish is equally appreciated across all sections of society. One can add on to the dish and make it as simple or as complicated or traditional as one wishes.

A typical family will have some pan fried vegetables and maybe a boiled potato to go with it. Fish fry, or a side of stir fried prawns is appreciated (most Odia side dishes are stir fried, shallow fried rather than deep fried).  “Badi”, the sun dried dumpling made from lentils, is another favourite accompaniment with the Pakhala. Fried bitter gourd or pumpkin flowers dipped in rice paste and shallow fried are popular anti pastos (or perhaps ante-pakhala?) before one consumes the main bowl.

Pakhala Revival

The timeless dish has had a revival in recent times, thanks to social media and the countless emigrated Odias rediscovering their roots through nostalgia. For people who went to school in the 70s and 80s, nothing completed a day better than to come to a bowl of “Pakhala” after a hot and dusty day at school.

However this acceptance of Pakhala as a regular mainstay of Odia cuisine was not very palatable even a few years back. I remember asking a friend outside Odisha whether they had pakhala at home and the defensive response was “maybe it is taken back in the villages, we don’t have it,"  immediately consigning it to a category as a dish for the rural poor. One cannot really blame the Odia “prabashis” for this type of sentiment. We have been categorized so long as an extremely poor state, that this dish kind of slammed the nail on the coffin of  “Odisha- a poor pakhala eating state”, hence perhaps leading to a reluctance to its acceptance as a proper State cuisine. At least till a few years back.

Thankfully, perhaps with the realization that Pakhala cannot be the worst thing to happen to us, has come an assertion and acceptance of our essential Odia-ness,  and acceptance of all our inherent culture, heritage, quirks, habits, dress codes, dishes, and the ubiquitous and all-encompassing Pakhala in all its glory.

#pakhala #worldpakhaladay

- Sm R

The Wonder That is Versailles - a Palace of Dreams

There are fewer things grander in European Architecture than the Palace at Versailles. 

The Hall of Mirrors, Palace of Versailles

Like Louis the XIV,s motto "nec pluribus impar", the Versailles Palace is more than a match for anything of the era. 

It fascinated me during my lectures on Landscape Architecture not just for its scale and grandeur, but also the ingenuity of some of the features. The kings of France took quite a bit of flak for the construction and maintenance of the Palace which eventually crippled their economy and lead to the French Revolution. But what a dream the Palace was! What started as a simple chateau and a Hunting Lodge in the forests for King Louis XIII, got transformed to one of the most grand Royal Courts in the world, that literally crippled a country in its maintenance. 

The Versailles Palace reinforced the glamour and lavish architecture inside and outside with the varied and colourful court life of the Royal entourage, the French Nobility and aristocracy. History notes numerous intrigues, secrets, treaties, scandals that lent colour to Versailles in the 17th and 18th century. All these have been graphically illustrated in many books and most recently the TV series "Versailles". 

 Louis the XIV, the Sun King,  improved upon the medieval chateaux he inherited from his father into a daunting and sumptuos Baroque residence and court that had around 2500 rooms and and a garden defying all expectations of grandeur..and profligacy. At it's busiest, the Palace had around 10000 people in it daily, occupied in various forms. For Louis the XIV, it was the Chateaux de Versailles that was the centre of the World. A palace to showcase and project his power, position and aura.

The gardens at Versailles were some of the most advanced for their age with never before seen features. The water parterres (large rectangular features of water body) were the highlights. They connected the various paths and reflected the various features, as well as the lit up the outside. If one stood at the Palace terrace, the line of vision would lead one through the orangery, many elaborately constructed fountains, sculptures, pyramids, a belvedere here, groves, there, to the large north and south water parterres.

Perhaps not satisfied with the crowd and his entire court at Versailles, King Louis XIV built another smaller (by Versailles standards) and a more private Palace 7kms to the west of Versailles, at Marly.  The Marly gardens featured some of the most unique hydraulic engineering seen at that age. 

Machine de Marly was a marvel of that time that was built to pump water from the Seine via aquaducts to the Gardens of Marly and Versailles. The complicated hydraulic system had fourteen gigantic wheels, initially operated manually, to haul water from the Seine, via 250 pumps. The water from Seine was directed  by well constructed dykes, and the water wheel transferred it to the aquaduct de Louveciennes, a series of basins, reservoirs, through some complex piping and machinery to eventually feed the water bodies at Versailles and Marly. 

The machine was however not sufficient to entirely feed the extensive water features of Versailles and Marly. It was considered to be extremely noisy as hundreds of workers operated it round the clock to keep it going! Even then it served Versailles for 133 years, before steam engines and other modifications took over.

    

Machine de Marly at Marly 
Vue de la Machine de Marly (1723) by Pierre-Denis Martin (Source - Wikimedia)

Elevation and perspective of the Machine de Marly (c. 1715) by Nicolas de Fer

 (Source - Wikimedia Commons)

By L.-A. Barbet - Les Grandes Eaux de Versailles, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38927687

Historians see Marly as a finished product as a result of all the experimentation on at Versailles! The Sun King was definitely one of those people who believed everything can be achieved, from the exquisite Hall of Mirrors where he held Court, to shifting his entire court to Versailles,  to having an exotic orangery and other marvels mimicking nature, to dragging water from the Seine to feed the numerous water features and magical gardens of the grand palace. 

To be able to dream, conceptualise and finally execute a marvel like the Palace at Versailles must have required quite a vision, and of course unlimited resources at command. Even though the subjects and courtiers of the Sun King and his descendents would have had every right to complain for the taxes, inconvenience, the world is still rich by Versailles.

References

http://en.chateauversailles.fr/discover/estate/gardens/fountains

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/destinations/europe/france/the-mechanical-wonder-that-powered-versailles-fountains/

- Sm R

Climbing Ben Nevis

 The morning of my third day at Fort William, I started for Ben Nevis. Ben Nevis is the highest peak in the British Isles and a favourite with trek lovers. It is a one day trek and one can easily reach the top if one plans accordingly. The walk from the B & B to the mountains was a distance of 3 kms. Not being an early waker, I reached the spot around 10 am. The beautiful walk had a curling field on the way. Curling was a popular old sport in the highlands which combined the raw strength of the Highlanders with strategy and skills. One has to slide huge round stones from one end of the play area to the other to reach its destination. It is called curling as the stones take a curvilinear path to reach the circle at the other end!

Curling Field, Ben Nevis

Reaching the foothills of the Nevis opened up a sight of a series of hills so breathtaking in beauty as only something so far up on the hemisphere can have. A stream bubbled along the foothills (River Nevis actually) and one had to cross it on a quaint wooden bridge. Then one had to climb up the stiles which lead to a paddocked field with sheep. Someone from the hot dusty tropical climate of coastal India could entirely appreciate the atmosphere of the place, and I was caught many a times just standing around and gazing. The climb was along a series of steps cut into the hills, and was quite unlike another climb I had done the previous year at Mt. Kinabalu. Unlike Mt Kinabalu, it was a raw climb, not too touristy, no porters or sitouts, or rope guides along the way. Even guide rails were missing at most places. 

I came across quite a number of interesting people along the way. An elderly Indian gentleman, who stayed in the vicinity, on his way down was surprised to see a solo lady climber from India. There was an adventurous young Chinese girl who was travelling on her own in Scotland by public transport. She had come straight from China (she was not a student in UK, I mean). Then an Australian lady who had camped in her car overnight at the Ben Nevis foothills, to get an early start on the climb. I love those Australian women. I feel they can do anything. I met a few of them on my journey in North UK. They have this unbounded energy and confidence. This particular lady was kind enough to give me a lift back to the B & B. She was interested that I was an Indian. She was going to start a new career in Chakra Healing. The Scotland trip was the beginning of a new start for her, having just left behind her old life which included her job and husband. 

"The path to the top is strewn with boulders" - Did anyone say that? Thats the truth anyways. The path was cut into the mountains. There were little bridges over gorges and planks over streams, The footpath was there in name only at many places along the route. The mountain goats were there in their lairs. Babbling brooks followed one on the trail (or the other way round, since I was climbing!)

I made it to a small loch nestled amongst the Ben Nevis, a bit after the halfway mark. It was called the Halfway Loch or more correctly the Loch Meall an t-Suidhe. The path to the top is on the right of the Loch.  I realised I didnt have time to make it to the top, having got a train to catch to my next destination, Glasgow (having dropped off my rental car the previous day at Inverness). So I climbed down to the Loch and dipped my feet in its pristine water, for some chilly meditation!!!

The range of mountains around the Glen Nevis make a stunning panorama. Carn Mor Dearg, Aonach Mor, Aonach Beag are the neighbours to the Nevis. Now try saying those names the Gaellic way as you prepare to climb the range!

The Halfway Lochan, Ben Nevis

Climbing Tips - Even though I went at the fag end of the British summer, the weather was chilly enough to layer up. I chanced upon a rare phase of Scottish sunshine and only had one day of drizzle in my Highlands stay.

Boots or shoes with grip are necessary as the route to the top is filled with rubbles and has a steady gradient. 

Walking stick is a must for any climb in my opinion as it makes everything so easy

Guides or being with a group would be good as they can point out the various features. However I tend to fall behind in groups as I satisfy my curiosity, so I avoid them. 

The biggest tip is - If you enjoy trekking, you are bound to enjoy this. Relax, wear some good shoes and have a nice journey!

I had this trip way back in September 2014. Just came across my notes and blog on paper,  dug some old pics and so here it is!

"Footpath" on Ben Nevis

The babbling brooks along the way

Across a wooden bridge

Panorama of hills