Ni Dieu Ni Maitre

One problem with this adventure intro the North Eastern States is the new 30 day visa policy. Not very much time to relax and see Assam, Meghalaya, or Nagaland not to mention Manipur, Tripura, Mizoram, Arunchal Pradesh, and Sikkim (a former country in the Himalayas, now a state) or Bhutan (still a country) or the gateway to all this, Darjeeling. Each of the last 5 times I have visited India, I was given 90 days, including just last year.

The other problem is the lack of tourist services. The main airport for the 6 state region at Guwahati has no ATM or money change facility in the Arrivals section and arrivals are not allowed into the Departures section, which has a currency changer. And I’ve covered my other problems on arrival here. Not really set up for tourism, after many decades of being generally off-limits to foreigners. I got very frustrated in Assam and happily left for Shillong, where I got lucky and had a fine time.

In Nagaland, Dimapur is just ghastly ,hot flatland roadside sprawl complete with choking air pollution. The road up to Kohima was worth the trip… great scenery passing into and through lovely mountain vistas. I was the only guest at my hotel or in their spacious restaurant, and the very young staff admitted that other than the October Hornbill Festival, they don’t see much business at all.

Incidents at the hotel? One evening I looked up from reading to discover dozens and dozens of winged insects getting through some cracks in the glass wall to the balcony and I had to call for reinforcements, They fly up at night to die which they did on the floor, the bed, in the bathroom… This only happened once.

Another incident. My, room was locked on leaving by a doorknob push button, and one night as I went across the lobby to the restaurant, I forgot to put the room key in my pocket and locked myself out. The young staff pulled out dozens of keys from the lobby desk, none of which fit my room and there was no master key. The young desk girl urged the young man to try a suicide mission, going onto the adjacent room ‘s balcony and in the pitch dark cross on a tiny ledge with plastic pipes on it, ducking under a protruding air conditioner and swinging onto my tiny balcony and open the door from the inside. There’s a 5 story drop from these little balconies. He made it. I suggested that it might be a good idea to have a key copy made.

Kohima itself has quite an appealing location, sprawling up and down high ridges, but basically there’s not much going on. Might as well mention something I suspected, since Shillong has dogs everywhere and Kohima almost none. I took no pictures of little paws sticking up on butchers tables, or wrote about the morning screams of animals being slaughtered somewhere below my hotel balcony but, yes, the Nagas will eat anything.

Will I come up here again? Yes, if I can wrangle a 90 day visa and move around at a relaxed pace. It would be attractive to me in the winter, when the highlands actually get bracing cold. SE Asia has got plenty of heat almost everywhere and most of the time. But cold, or even cool… hard to come by.