The Valley that Makes its Own Salt - Ziro Valley

In Arunachal Pradesh, the three-hour ascent from Itanagar into Ziro valley is a sight to behold. The winding road makes way for hills that open into a flat green bowl of rice fields outlined with pine. Visually its magnificent, but history will tell you that this beauty came with a price. At a climb of over 1,500 metres, almost nothing came up easily, which included something as basic today, as salt. Without it, the people of Ziro had to improvise. What was a happy accident, became their salt, called tapyo.

A need and a happy accident later

When Salori takes you into the home of an Apatani family — the tribe whose valley this is — two things reach you before the conversation does. The first is apong, rice or millet beer, poured generously into bamboo. The second arrives alongside it, offered with both hands: a small dark cake, crumbled just a little, meant to be taken as a pinch on the tongue, between sips. It tastes of smoke first, then tart mineral sharpness that offsets the beer’s sweetness — salty in a way that isn't quite salt. That’s because, Tapyo became the salt of the valley, long before actual salt made its way to the top.

A salt passed down by hand

On the back of a geological structure unfavourable to salt production, the people of Ziro couldn’t make their own salt, unlike neighbouring locales.

But nature works in mysterious ways. The Apatani people chanced upon tapyo. When washing hands using hearth ash as a substitute for soap, the Apatani people noticed it tasted salty. The rest was history.

The people began making tapyo, patiently, carefully gathering pepu and sarshe grasses from around the villages, and burning them. Once washed and filtered the resulting salt was slowly set into a firm dark cake. Interestingly, the process of knowing exactly which grasses to pick and how long to burn has never been written down, because the Apatani have no written script. The knowledge has travelled entirely in the hands of the women who make it, from one generation to the next.

As your Salori Curator will tell you, with no salt springs and no deposits, what came from barter, arrived rarely and cost dearly. So tapyo for centuries was simply salt that quietly did the job. An alternative arrived only when India launched its goitre control programme in 1962 and the iodized version came still two decades later.

Which means tapyo has only been optional for two or three generations — and it is slipping. Only a handful of elders in the valley still hold the knowledge, and every one of them learned it from someone who had no choice. Today it has altered, from something a family needed to something a family offers.

Everything else on the table

The fields you walk past to get to Ziro are just as carefully made as its salt. Ziro's rice terraces are fed by hand-built bamboo channels that step spring water gently from one plot to the next, and fish are raised in the very same flooded paddies as the rice — eating pests, enriching the mud, and eventually becoming dinner. No machines, no chemicals — one system, worked out centuries before anyone called it sustainable.

A system like that needs hands to both nurture and preserve it. That’s the thought others must have had as well, because this August, residents launched the Heritage Care Foundation with a plainly practical mission: to seek out paddy fields that have gone quiet as livelihoods changed, and bring them back into cultivation. A valley quietly reclaiming its own fields, so the recipe outlives the generation cooking it.

A kitchen built of bamboo

What those fields grow goes straight into a kitchen made almost entirely of bamboo, as you will see on the upcoming journey to Ziro Festival: slits and gaps around the central firewood hearth let the smoke drift out and make the whole room easy to clean. Bamboo is the cookware too. Rice is steamed inside a length of it, as are fish and greens, and everything carries a little of that green, woody sweetness.

There is wine to go with it as well, but from an unexpected source: kiwi, the fruit central mostly to the Australian continent. The wine came to be when an agricultural engineer, Tage Rita in Hong village, built a winery based on the area’s surplus kiwi produce. It became India's first organic kiwi wine, and is now studied in business schools as a case study on a second life for a fruit.

10,000 people, and not one plastic cup

All of this heritage comes together in late September, when the valley fills for the Ziro Festival — four days of independent music played out in the middle of the rice fields. The festival that showcases local music, food and culture, has grown from a few hundred in 2012 to some 10,000 people making the journey each September. It is what your Salori journey is built around. The stages are bamboo, raised by Apatani artisans, and so is your cup — the festival holds firmly to no single-use plastic, serving in reusable bamboo mugs and on biodegradable tamul leaf plates. Sticky rice comes out of bamboo over a wood fire, and apong out of a mug you return at the end.

Now that you have a better picture of the depth and vibrance this culture holds, come hungry and follow the Salori route. Find the story behind every bite in Ziro. It all begins with someone handing you salt.