04 5 / 2010
Itinerary for Arunachal Pradesh
Arunachal was a mystery place for not so long ago. The state is very pristine and primitive which attracts me to it. The tourist places which I could find over the internet are very far from each other and takes hours to days to get from one place to other. Our hitchhiking will be put to test in this state for sure. Hope we can find enough rides to hitchhike our way in this beautiful place.
Our most important place to visit in this state is none other than Tawang. We will complete that circuit before anything else.
The route we plan to take is Guwahati —> Tezpur —> Bomdila —> Tawang.
After finishing this picturesque Buddhist place. We venture out in the longer circuit covering the capital city of Itanagar. We heard that the below circuit is very beautiful to see and we really hope the weather doesn’t play the spoil sport.
The Circuit is
Ghy —> Itanagar —> North lakhimpur —> Ziro —> Daparijo —> Along —> Pasighat —> Tezu
Pic Courtesy: Arunachal Pradesh’s Photostream on Flickr
25 4 / 2010
Altitudes of the capital cities of the North Eastern states
Here’s the altitudes of the capital cities. If you noticed, the variation is quite a lot, and this is only the capital cities - we will be climbing some hills too on our way!
Aizwal (Mizoram) - 1080 meters (3544.5 feet)
Imphal (Manipur) - 790 meters (2591 feet)
Guwahati (Assam) - 52 meters (170 feet)
Itanagar (Arunachal Pradesh) - 750 meters (2460 feet)
Shillong (Meghalaya) - 1520 meters (4990 feet)
Agartala (Tripura) - 15 meters (50 feet)
Kohima (Nagaland) - 1495 meters (4904 feet)
— Ajay
Picture courtesy - Horia Varlan’s Flickr photostream
Disclaimer - The above picture is not of the NE.
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24 4 / 2010
Communicating while we are on our trip
Found out from our friends and contacts in the NE that only BSNL post paid cellphone connections work best all over the NE. Other operators do work in Assam, but either not reliable or are not present in other states at all!
That adds another item to our large list of to-do tasks! Get a BSNL post paid SIM card from Hyderabad before starting (we can’t get one in Guwahati because we won’t have a proof of residence there).
— Ajay
Picture courtesy - StephenMitchell’s photostream
22 4 / 2010
Itinerary for Tripura
Not much information is available regarding places to see in Tripura apart from its tourism website. Collected some info although. From the list the only place that excites me is the Jampui Hill Range. There are trekking possibilities and also to see Mizoram and Chittagong from the highest peak in Tripura - Betalongchhip.
Here are the places we plan to cover in Tripura:
- Agartala
- Ujjayanta Palace in Agartala
- Chaturdash Devata Badi - Agartala
- Kamalasagar (artificial lake) - on the border of bangladesh
- Sepahijala Sanctuary
- Neer Mahal - 60 kms from Agartala
- Unakoti - 178 km from Agartala
- Tripura Sundari Temple - Udaipur
- Jampui Hill - Trekking, Betalongchhip - highest peak in Tripura
Agartala is 24 hrs :( away from Guwahati by road and it traverses through Shillong. Hope the route is attractive enough.
-Inder
20 4 / 2010
Itinerary for Meghalaya
As said earlier, we are setting off on May 5th 2010 from Hyderabad. We travel from Hyderabad to Siliguri in West Bengal by train as we don’t want to make a bbq of ourselves before we even reach the North East.
We start our hitchhiking from Siliguri. We are skipping Darjeeling and Sikkim (and feeling very bad about it) as we have to complete the entire North East before the Monsoons cut them off the plains. Our first stop is Guwahati.
We have modularized our trip by treating each state as a separate leg and depending on the weather, events we might select the next destination.
We wanted to start with Meghalaya and end at Assam after Arunachal. But we don’t want to miss the dylan fest which happens in Shillong on May 24th. So we might cover Tripura earlier and then head to Meghalaya.
This is a rough itinerary of Meghalaya. Since we are hitchhiking along with camping equipment we do not know exact dates when we arrive at each location. Also, the information over internet is very less and vague. Hope after we come back we have enough info for the other tourists who plan to visit these places ( that is one of the agenda points).
Here is the list of places that we plan to cover in Meghalaya. In no particular order:
- Shillong
- Bara Pani (Umiam Lake)
- Cherrapunji - especially the road between Shillong and Cherrapunji
- Mawsynram
- Dawki
- Some of the numerous caves - especially the Krem Liat Prah (the longest natural cave in India)
- Some of the numerous waterfalls - especially the Nohkalikai Falls (read that is third highest in the world)
Picture: Ka Kshaid Lai Pateng Khowsiew (Elephant Falls), Shillong
Pic Courtesy: Neeraj2608’s Flickr photostream
20 4 / 2010
15
Above facts are from Wikipedia Picture courtesy Wikicommons
15 4 / 2010
Tentative plan
A lot of our friends are asking us for our exact itinerary and when we are leaving. Do have a little patience, we’ll be out with the details soon. Not in real deep detail, but we plan to have only a high level guide/schedule, we’ll be winging it mostly. Our tentative date of departure from Hyderabad is 5th of May. We plan to take a train to Kolkota and then a bus or train to Siliguri. Our adventure will start from here.
We’ll be out with more details soon, keep watching this space!
Here’s a piece of news which reminded us again that it’s not just a joyride we’re going on - 125 dead in storm in WB, Bihar and Assam.
— Ajay
13 4 / 2010
What are we doing apart from Hitchhiking?
So what are we planning to do while we travel?
We are flashpacking a bit with our gadgets to make blogging, tweeting, photography and podcasting possible.
These are the activities which we plan to do while we travel:
- Record folk and tribal music
- Put our amateur photography skills to test and try to capture the beauty of the North East in our camera lens
- Live blog the journey experiences on this blog
- Tweet our journey all the way
- Mark our entire journey by the GPS coordinates and put the routes up on TripNaksha
- Release podcasts regularly which deal with the travel experiences and destination details
- Last but not the least, immerse ourselves in the culture that the north east has to offer.
