Nagaland & Assam

One of our favourite places to get accustomed to the city’s distinctive ambiance is the College Street Coffee House on Bankim Chatterjee Street– a favourite hangout for Bengali intellectuals and artists. Grab a table under one of the paddle fans, order a dosa and masala chai from one of the turbaned waiters and you’ll soon be drawn in to the local ‘adda’, or chit-chat.

Today’s tour covers most of the city’s must-see sights, including the iconic Victoria Building on Kolkata’s Maidan, the Indian Museum’s famous collection of antiquities, the Writers’ Building and Park Street Cemetery, where an evocative collection of 18th and 19th century Gothic tombs recalls the early days of British rule. In the evening, drive across town to the Kali Ghat temple, dedicated to a black-faced incarnation of the Goddess Durga. The temple is the most important Hindu shrine in the city. Noisy crowds attend rituals here from dawn til dusk, forming snaking queues in the temple precincts as they wait to fling hibiscus flowers at the three-eyed, gold-tongued deity in the main sanctum.

The region’s main hub and site of its only airport, Dimapur, holds little to detain visitors, beyond a collection of enigmatic, mushroom-shaped stone pillars dating from the Kachari era of the 10th–13th century, which stand in an overgrown park near the Dhansari River. No-one is entirely sure what the curious objects were used for – the most likely theory is that they were funerary monuments.

Kohima, the state capital, saw fierce fighting in World War II. The battle for the town, which last for three months and cost the lives of 10,000 Allied soldiers, forestalled the Japanese into India.

Tuophema is a purposed built tourist complex, designed in traditional Naga style but with modern amenities such as air-conditioning and hot water! It serves as a perfect spot to break the long journey through the hills into the state’s heartland.

Among the first settlements to be converted by Baptists in the 19th century, Mopongchukit is a large Ao village, famed above all for its association with the story of Jina and Etiben, Nagaland’s own Romeo and Juliet. Wood carving is a local speciality, and you’ll see several elaborately carved wooden pillars of a kind traditionally featured in local morungs (men’s meeting houses).

The largest town in northern Nagaland is Mokokchung, cultural capital of the Ao Naga people, which will be your base for two nights.

Tuensang, in eastern Nagaland, forms the hub of a district that was among the very last in India to come under British rule. Women of the four local tribes are renowned weavers and jewellery makers, and you’ll have the chance to shop for their produce in local markets and houses. Usually dominated by earthy reds and blacks, with intricately woven end panels, body cloths made of cotton are particularly good buys – we find they make gorgeous sofa throws!

Mon is the homeland of the Konyak Nagas, who were among the last of the region’s minorities to be evangelized by Christian missionaries. At villages such as Longwa, many of the older men still sport tattoos denoting them as warriors who have cut the heads of enemy killed in battle. Elephant-hide shields, hornbill beaks, wild-boar tusks, spears and the giant horns of wild oxen decorate the walls of village chiefs. You’ll have opportunities to meet and photograph Konyak Naga people in their own homes and traditional communal halls.

The Ahom were ethnic Tai who ruled this area for six-hundred years, between the 13th and 19th centuries, until the British gained control of the area following the First Anglo-Burmese War of 1826. The dynasty left in the wake some impressive ruins, most notably the double-storeyed Rang Ghar amphitheatre and Talatal Ghar Palace at Sivasagar. Past TransIndus clients have expressed amazement at the scale and sophistication of the ruins, and the fact they’d never even heard of them, nor the Ahom Dynasty who built them.

At Majuli Island, you’ll attend a mesmeric dance drama performed by white-turbanned Hindu monks in monasteries set amid a bucolic landscape of rice fields. Established in 15th century, the 22 Vaishnavite monasteries, or Sattras, on Majuli are repositories of devotional art forms unique in India.

Nature rather than culture takes centre stage at Kaziranga National Park. Encompassing a tangle of water courses, marshes, huge tracts of long tarai grass and semi-evergreen forest, the park boasts one of the highest tiger densities of any in India. The stars of the show here, however, are undoubtedly the one-horned rhinos; around two-thirds of the world’s population of this highly endangered mammal live in the reserve.