Entering into Meghalaya
After the tour of Bali in Feb-March 2020, most of my time was spent at home. Work from home 😅. I had gone to some local places in Kokan and around Mumbai for weekend tours but had not gone on any week-long tours. Most of the 2020 and first half of 2021 was restricted for travel due to Covid-19.
Now since both me and Nikita had gotten both the vaccination doses, we were looking for some week long tours before year end. We got both of our doses by September and all the festive season in October, we were planning for some tour around November-December. Considering the winter season, we narrowed down on Kerala or North East. Kerala was not showing any good signs in Covid cases, so we dropped that idea and decided to work around North East states.
Talking about North East, things that come to our mind are 7 sisters and the offbeat destinations. Apart from Kaziranga National Park, I had Meghalaya on my wish list since long time. Just because I had seen many photos of waterfalls, crystal clear waters, jungles and what not. Though I was not so sure what all places are to be explored in Meghalaya or how to reach there.
So we narrowed down on Meghalaya and started searching on internet about it. I have a habit that for any place I have to go, be it for touring, leisure, photography or even trekking, I read endless articles on them. Google, Instagram, YouTube, I take whatever information I can get and I create a catalog 😅. This gives us some idea into what all these places had to offer. And most of the times, you get some common places and some 2-3 offbeat places.
Now knowing where we have to go, the next question was how. How do we travel from Mumbai and what about local travel? Where to stay? What and where to eat and the endless list of typical travel planning. For travel into the North East, Guwahati is the central hub which connects to all 7 state. That was a no brainer. So Mumbai to Guwahati flight. Next was local travel and stay. Since Meghalaya has lots of remote places, finding proper hotels there was little tricky. I opted for any ready made travel package I can get, but not too leisure. Kind of balance between comfortable travel yet exiting itinerary.
And we finalized our option with T Trikon. I had done lots of treks with them since their inception and was well aware about them. So we enquired and booked our seats for their Meghalaya Backpacking Tour for 28th Nov to 5th Dec.
Booked air tickets, started some shopping. The itinerary had mentioned visiting waterfalls, doing some treks, and all the adventure activities, so we did some shopping for trekking clothes, shoes, etc. Our flight to Guwahati was scheduled for departure at 6:40 in the morning at Mumbai's T2 airport. We slept for around 2-3 hours, left home at 3:30 am and reached the airport at around 4. This was my and Nikita's first air travel post-Covid. So, we were a little nervous about how smooth the check-in, security, and overall process at the airport will go through. But all in all, it was pretty straightforward and we departed well on time and reached Guwahati at around 10 am, where our tour leader Kshitij was waiting for us, with other fellow travelers.
Had some tea/coffee and light snacks just outside the airport and we all hopped onto our tempo traveler which would take us through our journey into Meghalaya. We left Guwahati around 11 am, getting out of city traffic and onto the outskirts. After around an hour, we crossed Khanapara town and entered into the state of Meghalaya!
Around 1-2 pm, we took a halt for lunch at Jiva veg restaurant. Later came to know that Jiva is a chain of restaurants and hotels as we could see lots of them in Cherrapunji and Shillong. Our tour leader jokingly said to have as much as rotis/chapatis here as afterwards on the tour, it would be mostly rice only 😆. After typical North Indian style sumptuous lunch, we continued our road journey.
By 3-3:30 pm, we reached Umiam Lake, which is a reservoir surrounded by hills near the city of Shillong. We got down, had some photo sessions around the viewpoint, spent some time, and resumed our journey.
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| Umiam Lake |
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| Boating in Umiam Lake |
When visiting the 7 sisters, which is in the North-East part of India, sunsets happen early. The states being in the easternmost part, they do see sunrise and sunset early. On top of it, being here in winter, by 4-4:30pm, it was getting dark and by 6-7 pm it was as dark as we see at 9-10 pm in Mumbai.
We reached Cherrapunji where we had our homestay at Melody Residency. Temperatures would be around 10-12 degrees but it was way cold! After getting refreshed, we had our dinner around a bonfire, some chit chats, a formal introduction with fellow travelers, and some briefing about the next 2 days.
Everyone hit the bed early after the day full of travel.
Adventures Await.
- To be continued.
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