Weaving the Dreams

Words before Foreword:
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This is not a Travelogue where the Traveler goes to every possible tourist spot, takes a snap of himself, blocking the entire frame thus making it irrelevant where the photograph was taken, gets the statistics of the place like how big it is, how many rhinos are still alive, what is the height of the falls etc and then writes the information in a blogspot page.

Rather this is a story about a fascinating week when we traveled to the beautiful lands of Assam and Meghalaya. It's so so difficult for me when it comes to expressing myself in words. I used to think camera is my best friend - but while going to Cherrapunjee, I was so mesmerized with the beauty and the wide spectrum of greens that I stopped clicking at some point of time. I was just trying to soak myself with the greens.

Foreword:
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When we were planning for the trip, we were a little worried about insurgencies in North East - and that's the biggest tragedy of independent India. The insurgency/terrorist attacks have made us believe that certain areas of our own country are not accessible any more. However we went ahead with the plan. And there was a blast at Tezpur 2 days before our tour started. When we were in Tezpur, another blast in Guwahati took 3 lifes. The political situation at Meghalaya also worsened and President's rule was imposed 2 days before we started for Shillong from Tezpur. We boarded the train from Guwahati on 5th April. On 6th, there were serial blasts in Assam (one in Guwahati where we were staying) which took 9 lives.


But we didn't change our plan.









The Plan
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Since we had a huge advantage of having my in-laws staying at Tezpur, we planned our itinerary with Tezpur (TZP) as the base station. Tezpur is itself a wonderful place - for the uninitiated, its 1 hour drive away from Kaziranga forest, and 3 hours from Guwahati. It's a small town on the banks of Brahmaputra in upper Assam, with Mahabharatic history strewn around, sometimes with little care. We will travel through TZP, but first lets get you familiarized with our itinerary.

28th Mar (Satday) - Start from Kolkata - Saraighat Express at 4PM
29th Mar (Sunday) - Reach Guwahati at 9 in the morning, go to Kamakhya temple
30th Mar (Monday) - Guwahati - Tezpur
31st Mar (Tuesday) - Roam around Tezpur
1st Apr (Wednesday) - Tezpur - Kaziranga - Tezpur
2nd April (Thursday) - Tezpur - Shillong
3rd April (Friday) - Cherrapunjee
4th April - Roam around Shillong, come back to Guwahati
5th April - Board Saraighat for Howrah
6th April - Home sweet home

BTW, we didn't have our return tickets booked. Because of the uncertainty of our workplace (& work), we have to rely on the Tatkal service of Indian railways anytime we plan to travel. And this time the tour was of more than 5 days - hence the window was yet to open for the return ticket.

But who cares for the return ticket when you have the ticket to go and a nice little plan?