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 For us it was terra incognita: the unknown land. We had once, long ago, visited the capital of the state, Itanagar. It had been little more than an administrative shantytown, then. Today, we were assured, it has improved considerably; but a new capital needs many generations to absorb the character of its hinterland. We were advised to take another route to really appreciate the feel of this green and spiritual state. We landed in Guwahati, drove across a bridge spanning the broad, brown, flow of the Brahmaputra, along the disgracefully potholed National Highway 52, through Tezpur, to the gateway town of Arunachal: Bhalukpong.
There’s an Inner Line check-post at Bhalukpong, manned by the APP, the Arunachal Pradesh Police. We realised that we were in a very sensitive, north-eastern state so we accepted their abrasiveness with good humour. Hopefully, as the tourist flow increases, much of their sand-paper manner will be rubbed away!
 We stayed in the Inspection Bungalow (IB) in Bhalukpong, beautifully situated above the Kameng Chu river which is the colour of moss-darkened bark: a blackish green. It gushes out of densely forested mountains, softened with swatches of mist snagged in their trees. Then the Kameng flows southeast, between broad and shingly banks, into the hazed horizon. The VIP suites in this IB are acceptable, but it won’t be easy to get them. Your best option would be to spend the night in Assam’s Tezpur where they do have at least one hotel in the two or three-star category.
 Bhalukpong, however, is a good introduction to Arunachal. It’s a foothills town: humid, wooded and with the faint, green aroma of stacked vegetables. It’s a primitive, but oddly reassuring fragrance evoking a time when vast forests covered the earth and the air was still clean and unspoilt.
The sun rose a little after four in the morning. India’s dawn breaks in Arunachal, and by 7.15 am we had driven out 3 kilometres to the Orchidarium at Tipi. The forests of Arunachal are a treasure trove of these beautiful flowers.
 They are, to the vegetable kingdom, what mankind is to the animal kingdom: the acme of evolution. Here, in Tipi, there were orchids in greenhouses, seedling beds, mist-chambers. Botanists fan out from Tipi into the jungles, searching for native and endangered species. They rescue them, propagate them, sell half to orchid fanciers, return the rest to the wild into the 100 sq km Orchid sanctuary in Sessa. We chose the plants we wanted to take back, on our return trip, and then began our voyage through the most magnificent forests we have ever experienced.
 We should really call them Mist Forests. We drove through cool mist virtually all the time. Sometimes it was a mere suggestion, as if we were looking at this burgeoning green world through a soft-focus lens; at other times it was a pea-souper obscuring everything beyond the bonnet of our Sumo van. But always, always, there was the forest hemming us in, embracing the road, spreading over the mountains like thick, furred rugs. Sometimes, thickets of wild bananas flapped their varnished paddles, at other times slim-trunked trees spread canopies of white flowers, once a creeper cascaded garlands of pale, cream, trumpet-shaped flowers with vertical strips of rich maroon.
Further on, bamboos clothed the slopes as thick as elephant grass. Feathery ferns had colonised the sides of the road and, just beyond, their giant cousins, the tree ferns towered. They were descendants of the first leaf-bearing plants that appeared on the earth 390 million years ago. Their fallen trunks formed out deposits of coal and oil as they were carried into the depths of the earth by upheavals, roaring rivers and thundering waterfalls.
 There were many such waterfalls, pouring down the wooded slopes and we wondered if the fossil fuels that they were creating would be of any use to our descendants, 400 million years in the future. These forests, by their sheer timelessness, inspire such epochal flights of fancy. This is probably why the Border Roads Organisation has cleared a patch of forest and built a temple
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