Blogs from Meghalaya, India, Asia - page 2

O Polynesian Paradise! (Hawaii) (Visited 2003) Warning – if you can’t do without spicy fare, skip Japan Airlines (which I had thought was the best deal, making as it did only one transit halt compared to the gallivanting one was expected to do if one was travelling by other airlines.) There are two choices on the menu – bland and more bland. Warning number two. Make sure your travel agent procures for you to and fro hotel vouchers from the airlines for transit halts atTokyo. I had to shell out $57 for a hotel room since I had a voucher only for the return trip. Also, take a crash course in Japanese. I went through a bewildering time with my passport being tossed around and nobody able to direct me to a hotel. No English speaking ... read more

Our trip, up to this point, had been concentrated in a pretty small area of the Himalayas in West Bengal and Sikkim. However, we would have kicked ourselves if we had come to this region of the world & failed to visit the Living Root Bridges of Meghalaya. We leave the Makaibari tea estate in a car driven by a teenage driver acompanied by his friend, loud bengali rock blaring on the CD player. We like it. We leave the mountains, & are soon driving thru a monkey infested military base & then thru Siliguri, the 2nd largest town in west Bengal. Arriving at the New Jalpaiguri train station several hours early for our train, we are quickly overwhelmed by this, our first exposure to Indian train stations. We are soon befrended by our "gardian angel", ... read more

As we neared Cherrapunjee we drove higher and higher, becoming engulfed in clouds and mist with visibility being approximately 5 metres. Being dropped off in lower cherra we wandered into a hotel to discover the rooms were out of our budget range and only available for one night. Wandering further down a lonely remote road through the mist in search of hotel, we came across an elderly local lady who informed us we should head to upper Cherra. As she was heading there herself, we shared a taxi to the local market located right next to Plaza hotel. Discovering the rooms were well priced the four of us checked into a shared room. Hungry from our days travel we headed straight to the restaurant and gorged ourselves on the worlds best momos and much more great ... read more

The next stop on the trip was Meghalaya, the land of clouds. The plan was to come from Kaziranga to Guwahati and go to Shillong, but got advise from locals to take a detour through a bus-stop before Guwahati, which we did. Saved a few hours, not that it matters when one travels without goals . You will not see any pictures of Shillong in this blog, I was shocked how crowded the city is. Narrow lanes bustling with cars and all sorts of vehicles, seemed like Mumbai (except Shillong had even lesser space). The city is now well known for its educational institutions and kids from all over India seem to throng here for good quality schooling. The central market was choc-a-bloc, with hardly place to put ones feet. All in all, it wasnt what ... read more

By the time the beautiful Barna Borat, our hostess in the air, smiled her customary goodbye at the drenched Guwahati airport, we had had enough of the clouds. The ATR from Kolkata was a bit scarier than the usual air journeys. Turbulence, the captain had said as I was reliving childhood fantasies where clouds shaped into snow castles, prancing unicorns, landing eagles and fighting demons. Then we proceeded to the house of clouds - Meghalaya. Guwahati is the sole gateway to the north-eastern states, linked to the rest of India by the 20-kilometre-wide Siliguri Corridor sandwiched by Nepal and Bangladesh. Rhinos, yaks and platoons of armed men march here. The threat of foreign aggression and internal insurgency keep this land a hot spot. To cross the Assam border to most of the other north-eastern states, you ... read more