My desire to travel to Tawang did not begin yesterday, or even the day before.
Over the past few years, I had travelled through most of the states of Northeast India. Arunachal Pradesh, however, remained the one blank space on my map. Eventually, I decided to head towards that empty patch.
From Kerala, Tawang is less a place than a measure of distance.
Run your finger across the map and you begin to understand how far away it is—a town thousands of kilometres from Kozhikode, close to the farthest edge of India’s northeast, beyond ranges that seem to belong to another world.
But it was not the snow alone that drew me there.
Some places call out to us because of their beauty.
Some because of their distance.
For me, Tawang was both.
There were five of us on the journey: Nasir K. C., Rafiq Paroli, Abbas, Tariq, and me.
Companions matter on a journey. Five people travelling to the same place do not necessarily experience the same journey. Each travels with a pair of eyes of his own. One notices the landscape, another the road, someone else the food, another the people. One may sit quietly, taking everything in; another may spend the journey photographing every passing scene.
Even then, I had a feeling that years later, when we spoke about this journey again, each of us would be remembering a different Tawang.
The day we left Kozhikode, I knew the journey would be a long one. What I did not yet know was what kind of journey it would become.
First, by air to Kolkata.
Then, by train to Guwahati.
From there, to Itanagar.
And then, by car.
It felt as though one journey had been divided into several smaller ones.
We were not in a hurry to arrive. The idea was to stop whenever we could, look around, talk, eat, sleep, and set off again.
After all, even when a journey has a destination, the road leading to it is never merely a corridor.
The road has a life of its own.
As we travelled from Guwahati towards Itanagar, the familiar plains gradually gave way to a different landscape. Hills appeared in the distance, trees changed along the roadside, and even the air seemed to acquire a new character.
When we opened the car window, the wind touching our faces felt different.
Before the map could tell us that we were moving deeper into the Northeast, our bodies already knew.
Beyond Itanagar, the journey became slower and more deliberate. The road narrowed in places, the bends grew sharper, and the valleys opened out far below. Houses became fewer. Human habitation gradually gave way to long stretches of wilderness.
We were entering a landscape where the road itself seemed to dictate the pace.
“Are we there yet? How much farther?”
Someone asked.
The driver smiled.
“You can measure distance in kilometres,” he said. “Time is another matter.”
There was laughter inside the car.
It was a small warning about the journey ahead.
In the mountains, distance is not measured in kilometres alone.
One bend follows another.
One climb follows another.
If the rain comes, there is another story.
If the mist descends, there is another.
The cold began to creep into the car.
First, we closed the windows.
Then the jackets came out.
After that, the caps.
The clothes that had been lying at the bottom of our bags since we left Kerala began returning, one by one, to our bodies.
The geography of the journey was being written on our clothes.
What we had worn comfortably in the warmth of Itanagar was no longer enough. The higher we climbed, the more our bodies had to adjust to a climate completely unlike the one we had left behind.
At one point, I looked through the car window and noticed something white lying beside the road.
“Is that snow?”
I asked.
The driver nodded.
“Yes.”
It was an ordinary answer.
For me, it was not an ordinary moment.
For someone who grew up in Kerala, snow is often something encountered through photographs or films.
Here, it lay beside the road.
Close enough to touch.
We stopped the car and got out.
I picked up some snow.
It was water.
And yet it was so cold that it hardly felt like water at all.
Held between my fingers, it began to melt.
Within moments, nothing remained.
A tiny white world that had existed on the roadside only a moment earlier had disappeared in the warmth of my palm.
You cannot hold on to snow.
Perhaps a view is like that too.
It lasts for a moment.
Then it becomes a memory.
As we climbed higher, the effects of the altitude became noticeable. Our breathing changed slightly, and even walking reminded us that we were far above the world we had left behind.
It was then that I understood that mountains are not merely beautiful.
They have their own rules.
Up here, even the human body is a guest.
We passed a small village and saw a few houses beside the road—built of wood and stone, with stacks of firewood in their yards.
A dog sat outside one of them.
Two children in school uniforms walked along the road.
As we slowed down, one of them turned and looked at us.
He smiled.
Then he raised his hand.
I waved back.
That was all.
Two seconds of friendship with a child we had never met, in a land we had never known.
The great memories of travel often hide in such small moments.
We stopped again at a roadside tea shop.
A fire was burning inside.
As we stepped in from the cold, the first thing that touched our faces was not the warmth.
It was the smell of smoke and tea.
The walls were darkened by years of smoke. A few pots stood in one corner, while packets of biscuits were arranged on a table.
The shopkeeper looked at us.
“Tawang?”
“Yes.”
He nodded.
“It will get colder.”
He did not say it as a warning.
It was simply a fact of life where he lived.
We drank our tea.
Holding the glasses between our palms, we let their warmth travel slowly through our fingers.
Wind outside.
A fire inside.
Our journey unfolding somewhere between the two.
When we climbed back into the car, the smell of tea lingered for a while.
Tawang was still far away.
But our anticipation had changed.
It was no longer simply the desire to reach the destination.
Now there was curiosity about what the road itself might have to tell us.
The climb towards Sela Pass was steeper and the road more demanding. Clouds occasionally drifted across our path, while the landscape became increasingly stark.
The soundscape of the journey became familiar: the engine labouring uphill, tyres gripping the road, and the occasional blast of a horn when another vehicle appeared around a bend.
There were moments when everyone inside the car instinctively fell silent.
Some bends were too precarious to ignore.
Others were too beautiful to miss.
As we climbed, the trees gradually thinned out. Bare rock became more common, and patches of snow appeared beside the road.
Then, quite suddenly, we found ourselves looking across a world of cloud and sky.
At one point, I looked out of the window and had the strange sensation that we were travelling above the clouds.
The world seemed to have fallen away beneath us.
“Here is where the real Tawang begins,” the driver said.
I looked outside.
And suddenly I understood that Tawang was not merely the name of a town.
It was an entrance.
A threshold between one world and another.
Evening was slowly settling over the landscape.
The last light caught the snow beside the road, making it glow against the gathering darkness. Faraway peaks faded into grey.
Inside the car, everyone was quiet.
The fatigue of a long journey had settled over us.
Yet no one was sleeping.
Everyone was waiting.
I could not have said exactly for what.
Perhaps for the first sight of the town.
Perhaps for the excitement of discovering what lay beyond the mountains.
Perhaps simply for the moment when a place that had existed in our minds for so long would finally become real.
At last, a few lights appeared in the distance.
One after another.
Small yellow lights glowing in the darkness.
Tawang.
No one announced that we had arrived.
But everyone inside the car knew.
A name we had spent years looking at on a map now lay beyond the window, transformed into a scattering of lights.
The car slowly entered the town.
Cold outside.
The warmth of the journey inside.
And in our minds, a small sense of wonder.
We had travelled all this way.
And at last, we had arrived.
In Tawang—the dreamland of travellers.