Priyom’s mobile phone rings just as he wrenches the steering wheel away from the abyss. To my horror he reaches for the phone, answers and shouts something unintelligible before dropping it to the floorboard and returning his attention to the unfolding disaster. In the back seats my wife and I both gasp and grab the seatbacks in front of us as we lurch toward the edge. I know the tires are going to slip over, but then we are back in the boulderish rubble of the landslide, jouncing so violently that my head bangs sharply on the side window.
Priyom stops the car, eyes wide. A tinny woman’s voice (his wife?) is yelling from the phone which is now on the floorboard. “Holy shit,” says my wife as she looks over the crumbling edge of the asphalt into the rainy valley. In front of us, the road is gone.
—
Earlier that morning…
We started the journey to Ziro at first light. Beginning in the city of Itanagar in the flat Brahmaputra valley, the highway climbs into the foothills of the Himalayan state of Arunachal Pradesh. Don’t be deceived—when I say foothills, remember that I’m talking about the foothills of the Himalayas. These are some serious foothills, comparable to the highest peaks of my Appalachian home back in North Carolina.
Priyom, my Assamese driver, tells me in broken English that the 60-mile drive will take five hours. Even by Indian standards, that sounds far too slow. “The road is very bad,” he mutters ominously. I have no idea what we’re heading into, but I’m hoping that the potholes don’t distract from the incredible mountain vistas sure to be along the way.
No such luck. It starts raining and the views are quickly lost to the mist and clouds. The good news is that the road itself is a marvel. It’s flat, paved, and entirely pothole-free. Unlike most Indian roads, it even has lines painted on it and signs marking the way. Despite Priyom’s ominous warning, this highway is the best road I’ve seen in the two weeks I’ve been in India’s northeast states. In fact, it’s the closest thing to an American-quality road anywhere I’ve been in India. We zip along at a respectable 100 KPH. At this rate we’ll be there in an hour!
The smooth ride is a welcome relief after the arduous journeys of the past few days. Yesterday, on the 9-hour drive to Itanagar, Pryom spent most of the day creeping through the pastures and verges alongside the highway where it was smoother than the road itself. I’m amazed at how well Priyom’s little Suzuki Swift handled the grueling torture. I wouldn’t have attempted the road to Itanagar in a 4WD Jeep, but somehow Priyom managed it in a tiny front-wheel-drive Japanese family sedan. The asphalt was completely impassable; there were potholes that would’ve easily swallowed his car. I’m not kidding. How the holes came to be so big and deep is a complete mystery, one that I’ve added to the long, long list of other mysteries I’ve encountered in India.
A greater mystery is the fantastic quality of the road to Ziro. Why is this little-travelled mountain path to a tiny Himalayan outpost in so much better condition than the main highways down in the valley? It’s obvious to me that the road is meant to be a showcase, like India’s version of America’s Blue Ridge Parkway, yet it’s a very long way from a large population center. Plus, it’s hard for tourists to even get here—we’d had to obtain special permission from the Indian government to enter the border state of Arunachal Pradesh, and then we’d had to go through a scary border crossing and several checkpoints where our documents had been suspiciously examined by armed guards.
I suspect the reason for the road’s existence is entirely political. Since 1947, Arunachal Pradesh has been claimed by both India and China. As with most problems in India (at least according to the Indians), you can blame it on the British, who during their tenure as overlords drew two different and sloppy borders on the regional map. When the British withdrew, they neglected to clarify which of the two borders was official. India claims that the northerly border is correct, China maintains that the southern border was what the British intended. Poor orphaned Arunachal Pradesh falls between the two map lines, a small piece of incredibly out-of-the-way land made important by a political dispute.
India actually controls the region, but every so often China tries to build a road across the border and the Indians come and chase them away. To stymie the Chinese, India is hoping to promote settlement and economic development in Arunachal. The best way to do that is to make it easily accessible, hence the good road. Benefiting from the economic development, the indigenous tribes that inhabit the area will form closer ties to the Indian government. Also, the growth encourages more Indians to move to the state from elsewhere in the country. At some point, the government hopes, Arunachal Pradesh will be so thoroughly Indian that the Chinese will have no alternative but to give up their claim.
The car climbs higher through twisting switch-backs. Priyom throws the little Suzuki into the hairpin turns with gusto. He is enjoying himself, and so am I. As the rain diminishes, I get occasional glimpses into the valleys below: deep jungles, beautiful lakes, tiny villages strung alongside rivers. I start to relax; the smooth pavement has lulled me into a sense of safety and security.
The first sign of trouble is a small rockfall that blocks the innermost lane. I snap a photo, wondering why the highway crews haven’t cleaned it up. A kilometer later we’re forced to detour around a monolithic boulder the size of a subway car that has cratered into the center of the highway, blocking both lanes. Priyom carefully maneuvers the car along the verge between the boulder and the precipice, honking incessantly to warn any cars who might be attempting the same precarious maneuver from the other direction. There are no guard rails. I hold my breath and snap a few more photos. I wonder how the road crews will remove the boulder. Lots of dynamite, I imagine.
Moments later we encounter another landslide, this one so bad that it covers both lanes and spills over the edge into the valley. Other cars have crossed before us, making a path of sorts over the top of the mounded rubble. Priyom follows their tracks while my wife and I hold our breath, watching small pebbles cascade away from the tires and over the edge.
The higher we go, the more I begin to realize what Priyom had meant when he’d said the road was “very bad.” I’d assumed from his warning that the asphalt would be full of potholes like all the other roads. This is not the case. In fact the road isn’t bad at all—at least when it isn’t buried beneath a million tons of rubble from a landslide. I pull up Google Maps on my phone and switch to Terrain view. From the looks of things, all 60 miles of the highway are carved into steep mountainsides, crossing two ranges and winding through more than a half-dozen high passes. It must have cost a fortune to build this beautiful road, I think, how could the engineers have possibly ignored the threat from landslides? Even I know the rainy season monsoons around here are pretty tremendous. It doesn’t take an engineering degree to know what happens when you add torrential rains + steep mountains + poorly-engineered road-cuts.
Epic landslides, that’s what. I mean genuinely epic landslides, like when a significant chunk of the seven-thousand foot mountain liquefies and pours down onto the brand-new highway and completely obliterates it. Not just a few landslides, either, but dozens and dozens of them. With the exception of the first few miles coming out of Itanagar, the entire length of the road is afflicted.
Our headway slows to a crawl. We join a line of vehicles waiting to cross a pile of rock fifty feet high—that’s five stories of landslide. The road is buried somewhere underneath and the vehicles are once again forced to drive over the mounded and crumbly rubble. It looks incredibly dangerous. We pass an overturned cargo truck at the top of the landslide. I’m surprised it hasn’t slid off the edge and crashed a thousand feet down the side of the mountain. Priyom grimaces. “Very dangerous,” he says. My wife snaps a picture. She’s been quiet for the past half hour. I notice that her knuckles are white where she’s holding the door handle.
Over the next three hours we cross dozens more similar landslides, picking our way through the boulders and scree, sometimes following the paths of other vehicles, sometimes blazing our own trail. Priyom seems to have a knack for picking a path that the little Suzuki can handle. Every time I’m convinced that we’re stuck, he always seems to find a way ahead.
Far worse than the slides that originate above the roadway are the slides that occur below the road. In these cases, the ground the road was built upon has slipped away from beneath the pavement, leaving a ragged edge with nothing beneath it but a long, screaming drop into the valley. Unlike the other types of landslides, you can’t see these until you’re on top of them. They can lurk around any corner of the thousands of hairpin curves. The precipice is usually so steep that there’s no way to look over the edge and see if there’s anything supporting the asphalt. There are instances when I look down out of my side window and see nothing but empty air.
By the time we reach the place where the road has fallen away into the valley, we are all exhausted. Priyom retrieves his phone from the floorboard where it ended up during the panic stop and talks low and fast, probably trying to convince his wife that everything is okay. He hangs up and turns the car off and gets out to scout the situation. I join him. The air is still and wet, and I can hear the horns of the vehicles coming up the mountain behind us. Water runs down from the side of the mountain and forms a stream across the road. It pours over the broken edge of the asphalt and vanishes into the bottomless mist. I’m afraid to get too close to the edge, but Priyom walks right up and looks over. He sighs.
I don’t relish the long drive back down into the valley, but it seems we have no choice—there is only one road to Ziro. Then I notice Priyom staring above us into the steep jungle, where someone has left a fresh set of tire tracks through the muddy undergrowth. He motions for me to get back into the car.
The next two minutes I will never forget as we trundle, slipping in the mud, over the gaping hole of the missing road. The tires spin and my heart skips a beat, but Priyom skillfully keeps the Suzuki from sliding off the mountain. Then we are back on the pavement, and he guns the engine—at least until we reach the next landslide, less than a kilometer down the road.
-*-
We’ve descended into a lush valley. The landslides are gone. Priyom speeds up, more to release his built-up tension than anything else. I can see a village ahead and below us. It’s our destination, Ziro. We’ve made it.
Moments later, speeding around a corner, Priyom slams on the brakes and we skid. It’s the first time he’s ever lost control of the Suzuki.
“Holy shit,” my wife says for about the hundredth time. But this time, it’s not a landslide.
There’s a house in the road, blocking both lanes. A large, two-room bamboo house. It’s moving.
A hundred villagers are carrying the house. They’ve placed a dozen long, thick bamboo poles beneath the floor and hoisted it into the air, five men on either end of every pole. They stop and stare at us.
Priyom sighs. I look for a way around but there is none. Then I notice Priyom eyeing the partially-flooded rice paddies next to the road and I know without a doubt that we’ll soon be past this obstacle, just like all the others.
Because in India, anything is possible.
To see all the posts in this series (Seven Weeks in India), click here and scroll through the post listings.
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