When I wrote last time, I had a little secret. I met a very nice Korean woman in Pelling, Sikkim, and had been traveling with her for about a week. Neither one of us wanted to go public at that point, so I kept it under my hat. Now we’re okay with it. She’s very camera shy and rarely lets me take a picture of her, but here’s one of her behind her sunglasses and hat. Her name is Myung.
After doing the last few days together in West Sikkim, we swung through Kolkata to get my glasses and went to the northeast states of Assam and Meghalaya. Again, these are different places than anywhere else in India. I’ll never get over how diverse India is. Just when you think you’ve seen it all…, as they say. They are fairly isolated, situated to the northeast and east of Bangladesh and connected to the rest of India by a narrow strip of territory in northeast Bengal. there are seven northeast states, of which three can be visited by foreigners without time-consuming and expensive permits. Assam and Meghalaya are two of them. Tripura is the third. Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Mizoram and Manipur are next to the Chinese border, have sometimes active rebellions, and sometimes hostile tribal people, so access is controlled. We thought about going there, but decided not to go through the hassle. We were going to go to Tripura, but to get there from Meghalaya would entail an overnight 10 hour bus ride just to the first leg of the 20 hour trip. also, there was a severe cyclone just next door in Bangladesh which killed thousands. At the time, we didn’t know how bad it was going to be and we would have had to take this ride right into the teeth of it. The weather was foul enough where we were. So we only went to Meghalaya and Assam.
  Guhawati, the capital of Assam is nice enough. It’s a work-a-day city, not too big or dirty. There’s a village about 30 km from there, Sualkuchi, which is known for it’s golden colored silk. We went out there on our way back through and looked at “factory” there and bought a piece to make into a camisse for Myung.
  Up the main road from Guwahati is Kazinanga, a nature preserve with about 1700 one-horned rhinos, along with some tigers, elephants, boar, bison and other big mammals. UNlike looking for tigers in Ranthembore, there are plenty of rhinos to be seen. You can go out on an elephant and wade out where they wallow and/or go by jeep within several hundred meters. We did both. The elephant “safari” was well worth it. The guy in the back with the gun is in case one of those nearly blind rhinos gets perturbed and charges. Fortunately, they’ve never had to shoot one. The gunshot unpreturbs them.
Here’s a baby.
  After thaty we went to the 800+ sq. km Majuli Island in the middle of the Brahmaputra River. It was very peaceful out there. It’s gotr a paragraph in Lonely Planet, but it won’t be jaded any time soon. Below are pictures of a ferry like ours passing the other way, just a pretty picture of the water, and a couple of pictures of a nice looking woman on the ferry and her kid.Â
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Here is a lane in the village where we stayed, our guesthouse and a couple of idols set up for a puja going on there. That’s Paravati, wife of Siva, with the body of a cow. This explains a lot about India and Indian women, I think. Just kidding. The other one with the blue tongue and the nassty disposition is Gurga. She smotes countless evil beings and eats their hearts out.
The capital of Meghalaya is Shillong. It’s a small city by Indian standards and has kind of small town feel to it. Here is the State High Court building. How can you not like a place with a pink High Court building? Those stiffs with the starched shirts out front were probably prominent figures, even though their demeanors appeared quite informal.
The northeast states are, as Lonely Planet says, “the road less traveled”. There are few tourists here and no tourist ghettos. It’s so nice to not have to be part of the tourist scene. That really gets awful sometimes. Here, you can just wander around and mind your own business. About the nicest thing we did in Shillong is go to this nice park and wander around with all the nice couples.
Here’s another one of Myung, sitting on the grassy bank of the lake.
And finally, here is a picture of a waterfall we saw while on a bus tour of the area south of Shillong. That area is the rainiest place on Earth, with aver 650 inches of precipitation a year. And with the cyclone coming in to the southwest, it was quite rainy. There are other pictures, but none too good. Also, I just didn’t bother to get out and photograph vistas you couldn’t see through the weather.
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  We’re going to Babuneswar then Puri, Orissa, tomorrow. I don’t know much about Orissa. They say the coast is like Goa about 20 years ago. Orissa is famous for the arts and temples. I’ll let you know what I find out, of course. I wish I could write everything and show you all the pictures. Until then, be well, all of you.
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