North East India - Paradise Discovered....

While I love travelling and have been a wholesome wanderer for a large part of my life, I never really got down to penning down my experiences. I always used to be a reader of people’s travel blogs and adventures and was silently grateful to some of them for sharing their experiences which at times made my trips more meaningful and memorable. I finally decided it’s time to pen down my experiences, hoping, they’d be useful to other seekers. If not, I’d only be glad to have them documented as contribution towards my own nostalgia!

Travel is indeed food for the soul. It liberates the mind from the routine and gives wings to creativity and becomes a great setting for introspection. It is the best form of detox. We’re a Mumbai based couple, both professionals, we ensure that we take time out every year from our corporate slavery in February to set off for a couple of weeks. February is usually a great time for a holiday with the weather, crowds and rates all magically converging to satiate your wanderlust! The fact that it is also our anniversary month seals the deal for us! 

We love to plan our own holiday with complete control and flexibility over each and every aspect involved in it. We loathe the ready-made travel plans peddled by tour operators and travel.coms

This year, we actually started our planning pretty late (December) and eventually even succumbed to the temptation of having a travel consultant plan it for us and took significant trouble to explain the nuances of our preferences to the guy as well. The pathetic ‘one size fits all’ response received from him, sealed our distrust and disgust towards anything ‘readymade’ when it comes to our holidays.

After a lot of deliberation, weeks of arguments, fights, forecasted budgeting and couple of ‘This is my side of the bed’ kind of friction, we finally agreed upon North East India as the destination for our 2018 adventures! (2015 was Thailand, 2016 - Sri Lanka, 2017 - Uttarakhand). While I had been to the north east through a fabulous youth exchange program via the Rotaract Club - The youth wing of The Rotary International, my wife had never been there. I am appending our 15 night - 16 day itinerary along with all the details of the places we covered and shall also break down each segment in detail in subsequent blog posts with the hope that it would help you plan your trip better with important tips thrown in! So this is how it went….

I’ve decided to break up our trip into 3 segments which I will cover in my upcoming blogs:

Segment 1 — Guwahati, Shillong, Dawki and Cherrapunjee

Segment 2 — Gangtok, Lachen & Lachung

Segment 3 — Ravangla, Pelling, Darjeeling & Mirik 

February	Plan for the day	Night At
3rd	Mum - Guwahati (Kamakhya) - Shillong	Shillong
4th	Dawki - Mawllynong	Shillong
5th	Shillong - Cherrapunjee - Guwahati	Guwahati
6th	11 AM Flight from GAU to Bagdogra - Gangtok	Gangtok
7th	Gangtok - Local sight seeing	Gangtok
8th	Gangtok - Tsomgo, Baba Mandir, Nathu La	Gangtok
9th	Gangtok to Lachen	Lachen
10th	Gurdongmar Lake - Night @ Lachung	Lachung
11th	Lachen to Lachung - Yumthang & Zero Point	Lachung
12th	Lachung local sightseeing & drop to Gangtok	Gangtok
13th	Gangtok to Pelling	Pelling
14th	Pelling	Pelling
15th	Pelling to Darjeeling	Darjeeling
16th	Darjeeling	Darjeeling
17th	Darjeeling	Darjeeling
18th	Darjeeling to Bagdogra to Mumbai	HOME