As i walked on the streets of Guwahati, with hordes of mayflies milling around, their transparent wings akin to a veil which i parted to be transported back to Lama Camp. Situated at 2000 mtrs, a motley gathering of tents and few permanent structures, it was to be our home for four days. The journey began on 4th april for those who travelled by train, the cacophany of shrill children aside the outside scenery cooled my eyes. From Guwahati to Nameri the journey was a change of season, from summer we entered monsoon in a couple of hours.
Having tasted wildlife in Nameri in the form of 100 sps. of birds, Indian large civet, Indian giant squirrell, our appetite was only whetted for more things to come. Lama and sessni offered us rufous necked hornbill, long billed wren babbler, beautiful nuthatch, rufous backed sibia, pale blue flycatcher, blue fronted robin, brown bullfinch even though wards trogon and bugun liochichla eluded us.
Lama camp teemed with jewels on wings, sapphire, ultramarine, verditer flycatcher we saw eveyday while white browed shortwing, small niltava and indian robin flashed their blues and disappeared. The minla's we saw all, red, blue and chestnut, the yuhina's were straited, white naped, whiskered, stripe throated and black chinned and the black faced, grey hooded, golden spectacled, grey cheeked, chestnut crowned and white spectacled flycatcher warblers added yellow to our day.
Sessni was a true rain forest, with tall trees and huge overflowing canopies and the rains always unannounced. We walked 14 kms one day, a walk which gave us glimpses of some very rare and endangered birds while also exposing us to the threats that this place faces in the form of a deliberately lit forest fire which the guys put out with a huge efoort.
My favourite trail was a walk from Eaglenest pass towards lama camp a distance of 10 kms. The path hugged the mountains, winding up and down, the air was crisp and all around us magnolia's, pines and other high altitude trees. Looking at the opposite mountain we saw signs of elephants while around us was an un-natural quite. Adding to the mystery was fog which enveloped us in thich layers and evaporated just as it came. This quiet was sometimes broken by loud bird-calls, the birds unwary of us sang lustily while we searched for them and then suddenly as the fog lifted in lithe little ribbon we would see the bird just as they would see us and vanish into the mountainside leaving echoes of whirring wings.
The trip is now like that echo, an echo of memories that flash in my mind. A thousand images and sounds, a view of tibets mountains in the far distance lit afire by the rising sun, the dark night in sessni without a pinprick of light, the clatter of a thousand hails on the corrugated roof, threatening to bring the house down, a shallow river crossed in a tiny boat and then a sea of pebbles polished to a rounded smoothness showing off jewel like colours, the huge white blooms of a magnolia and ruby red rhododendron, a thousand more images i cannot describe.
