Posts

Stilwell Road to Pangsau Pass Festival

Image
Pangsau Pass is on the border between Arunachal Pradesh and Myanmar. Since 2016 there  has been an annual festival celebrating the tribal groups that straddle the border. To get there one travels on the Stilwell Road to Nampong. The Stilwell or Ledo Road was a WWII project that began in December 1942 and ended in May 1945. It was built to connected British India to China in the fight against the Japanese. General Joseph Stilwell was the name of the American in charge of the project. The road was built to transport supplies to China from Ledo in Assam overland to Kunming in China via Pangsau Pass (elevation 1,136m). The pass was the first big obstacle encountered by the engineers in charge of the road. The pass was nicknamed "Hell's Pass" due to frequent landslides.  Pangsau is the name of the village on the Myanmar side of the pass and Nampong is on the Indian side of the pass. Nampong is where we went for the Pangsau Pass Festival on January 20th, 2020. Stilwell

24 hours in Namdapha

Image
Namdapha National Park  Wreathed Hornbill - two males and two females fly above in Miao. We were going to visit Namdapha Park and only had two days with one-night camping. This was my third trip there and it was just as special as the previous two. I love this place. If I think about one place in the world where I could live this would be heaven. Before going to the park we had to buy a few supplies in Miao. We came across a group of young women and men that were heading to the village for the weekend. They first cross the river by boat then get into one of the jeeps that wait on the other side of the river. Life in Miao is very slow - it has a "back-in-time" feel. But there is some development in tourism. Over the past three years, there has a marked increase in the number of small restaurants and bars built along the riverbank in Miao.  One new place even made small cabanas out over the water. I wonder how long those will last. The ferry is how everyone