TENGA VALLEY DAYS

"Riding the Light" (Photo credit: Maureen Clark Photography)

During my posting in Tenga Valley of Arunachal Pradesh one cold and dry sunday morning like today,we received a message from our officiating Officer commanding " All officers immediately assemble at the Riding School". Our Colonel had been summoned to Corps HQ for some urgent work.

We hurriedly put on our riding breeches and rushed to the riding school. As soon as all the officers had assembled there we were told to go for a cross country equestrian practice. We were to assemble at Divisional Army Officers Club after exactly 1 hour.

DSC01551 (Photo credit: rajkumar1220)

We rode over the trekking paths, small hill streams
 gushing downhill,small flowering bush avoiding
hanging branches. The sound of the hooves of twenty horses reverberated throughout the small valley. The Monpa children and womenfolk came out of their kacha houses to watch the spectacle.

"The Monpa (Tibetan: མོན་པ།; Hindi: मोनपा, Chinese: 门巴族) are a major people of Arunachal Pradesh in northeastern India.[1] Currently they are also one of the 56 officially recognized ethnic groups in China. Most Monpas live in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, with a population of 50,000, centered in the districts of Tawang and West Kameng. Around 25,000 Monpas can be found in the district of Cuona in the Tibet Autonomous Region, where they are known as Menba" (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We reached the Officers club after about an hour and started exploring the large ground to tie our horses. After ten minutes we decided to tether our horses to the pipeline supplying water to the club. There were no trees or any strong pegs to tie our tired horses.

We enjoyed our stay at the club and had good fun, but it was cut short by the commotion in the ground. We rushed to the place of disturbance and found that our steeds had pulled off the water pipe. The horses got panicky by passing Army vehicles on the road above and pulled together..imagine the strength of twenty horses.

English: Monpa dancers performing a Yak dance (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

All of us decided to leave immediately and get back to our mess.

Next day our Colonel came back from Calcutta and received a letter from Club Secretary  about the damage done by us. He called the officiating Officer Commanding and all the erring officers to his office to give us a dressing down ....


---daman
13/02/2014