Assam

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March 5th 2006

Published: July 6th 2006

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todd whaley

Construction with Bamboo Scaffolding

From Khajuraho we flew to Delhi and spent a night at a hotel near the airport. All of the internal flights we took for the Sierra Club trip were on Jet Airways Airlines. The planes were just like any jet planes you take in the States with about 30 or so rows of seats and a meal on flights longer than a couple hours. One nice feature was that they had English language newspapers (The Times of India and The Hindustan Times) in front of every seat instead of the Skymall advertisement magazines on American flights. They also passed around a basket of mints and hard candies at the beginning of every flight. The meals were pretty good with a choice of “veg” or “non-veg”. If you didn’t ask by default they would give you the vegetarian meal. In one meal there was what appeared to be green bean on top of the rice. After biting into it and taking a couple chews, I suddenly realized that it was some kind of EXTREMELY hot pepper. Instantly, my eyes and nose started watering, and I got the hiccups. All I had to cool my mouth was a tiny 6 ounce bottle of

Transporting Goods

water that came with the meal. So I had to take little sips of it and wash it around in my mouth to try to kill the pain.

Early the next morning we flew to the state of Assam which is in the far northeastern part of India north of Bangladesh and Myanmar (formerly Burma). This is where a majority of the tea in India is grown. From the airport, we road in SUVs for 5 hours to Kaziranga National Park. This gave us a chance to see a lot of villages and towns in Assam. They were a bit different than other areas we had visited. There were a lot more palm trees and bamboo was used more for construction. We would see big trucks loaded with huge bundles of 50 foot long bamboo poles. In the countryside there were tea farms and rice patty fields everywhere. Another big difference in Assam was they spoke a different language, Assamese. There are 18 different languages recognized by the Indian constitution with over 1600 recognized minor languages and dialects.

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