India turned out to be a nightmare.  The last time I wrote we were off to shoot a story with an environmental movement who are based a few hours flight from Delhi.  Basically the Government has built a dam and in the process have displaced over a million people, they never relocated any of the villages and so they lost all their farm land and have no way of making a living and now live in squalor all over the place as the places that had been home for hundreds of generations are now under water.  They have formed a movement that is fighting for what they call land for land, this being India though every time there is a peaceful protest they are arrested by the police and locked up... sound familiar?

So off we went to meet our contacts and film them at one of their peaceful protests.  The drive there was hairy in the extreme with our driver playing chicken with trucks on the mountain unsealed roads, which took 10 hours from the airport to the tiny town we would be filming in.  We got some great stuff in the first couple of days and then we went to film our main characters at a protest.  When the group of 100 peaceful protesters, all displaced people including their children ranging from newborns to teens sat and began to chant the Indian army came by the truck to arrest them.

Being arrested in India is pretty brutal.  Army were dressed in riot gear and all drunk and set about beating anyone in their sight.  Men, women and children and old people and even a few cows that were in their vicinity.  Tim and I had a lucky escape and managed to not be seen by the police although they had questioned us earlier in the day and had taken down our details and one of the young volunteers from Assam got away too.  But because the movement believes in the Gandhi approach to Peace, they would not run and would not fight, they just saw as the blows reigned down on them.  They were all taken away and locked up, even the children, it broke my heart.

Late that night while it was still dark we left the town and picked up the remaining volunteer from the movement and we moved to another place to lay low as we knew the police would be looking for us and being the only foreigners in this remote area in India we were not that hard to spot.

As all our contacts had been arrested we were going to meet up with another division of the movement so we could continue to shoot their story, it seemed even more important now to get this out to the world.  We met our new group and they asked us when we had to leave India, we told them in three days.  The plan was to get some vision of the dam site by boat and then get back to Delhi as we had the main bulk of our story, they assured us this was not a problem and we would be back the following day, this was to be the last shot we needed for our very last story to be filmed for the doco.

The problem was that we would have to be smuggled in through the mountains as to drive to the dam would be too dangerous as the authorities would be waiting for us and if caught, we would be arrested.  Once again our problem of being non-Indian and carrying camera kit doesn't really allow you to blend in!

This is where it all went wrong for us.  We never returned the following day, we returned the following week.

It started off all well enough with what we were told was to be 30 minute hike through the mountains, about an hour in we realized that we were still miles from the river and therefore this couldn't be the short hike they had told us about.  It was about 113 degrees and not yet mid-day but our guide assured us that we would be there very soon.  Four hours later we were still hiking and the temperature had risen significantly, Tim and I were already dehydrated and burnt, yet again we were told that we were nearly at our destination.  I started to get a bad feeling about this and was worried that we had already finished the water we had brought with us and we still had the return journey to consider.  We walked on carrying all the camera kit that was starting to weigh a tonne and after the fifth hour climbing and sliding over the mountain range the river was still looking no nearer.

I started to get angry with the situation we were in and when we quizzed the guides about getting to the dam before nightfall we were told that we had to stay in a village for the night as our boat hadn't turned up and so we would have to wait until morning, this was never part of the plan.  There was no way they could have known that the boat was not there as mobile ‘phones did not pick up reception where we were.  It was at this point we realized the guides were up to something, they made us stay for the night and gave us what amounted to a handful of rice, the first thing we had eaten all day.

I refused to drink any of the untreated water as I did not want to get sick so far away from anywhere but in the end I relented as I know dehydration is extremely dangerous and we had been losing body fluid through sweating all day with nothing to drink and so reluctantly I took a sip or two.  

We lay on the hard ground but did not really sleep a wink even though we were exhausted, our burnt skin and the swarm biting mosquitoes saw to that.