A Moment’s Reflection
In the morning after facing cameras of local TV channels we took leave from our hosts and proceeded upstream towards Arunachal Pradesh, the Indian state where Yarlung enters India and is christened as Brahmaputra.
n the morning we started downstream for our journey in Assam. Brahmaputra here is a very different river than Yarlung was in Tibet. It is wide and flows in a very breaded manner which makes finding navigable channels quite a job. Very often one gets stuck in shallow waters and the crew has to jump out to push the boats over sand banks. Fortunately the water here is not very cold and under the warm sun it feels good to get wet once in a while.
Highlight of the day was frequent sighting of river dolphins jumping out of water, but as they neither give any surface clue of their presence nor there is any fixed frequency pattern of their breaching the water surface.
All this makes photographing them virtually impossible but the joy of seeing them every now and then is certainly a great experience. All along we have also been seeing some aquatic bird life which is very welcome, considering that there is so much of boating and fishing activity on the river. What we are seeing now are the resident species of birds because the migratory ones are yet to arrive.
Our camp was once again on an isolated sand bank from where we enjoyed a glorious sunset.
In the morning after facing cameras of local TV channels we took leave from our hosts and proceeded upstream towards Arunachal Pradesh, the Indian state where Yarlung enters India and is christened as Brahmaputra.
Later in the evening we pitched our first camp in India on a sand bank and celebrated the beginning of Indian part of the expedition around a log fire under a open starry sky.