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Showing posts from October, 2014

Backpacking across upper Assam: Part 3/3

Now I reach day 3 of my journey and suddenly I realize that this is a completely new territory for me. Prior to this I always had a local contact to help me out and provide me roof as a fall back to anything. But now I was marking the unknown, unhindered, unsupervised, and uninsured. Therefore very astutely I decided upon reaching Digbrugah , to pay a visit to Jokai Botanical garden, a region so remote that I had to change autos to get there, and the place is completely devoid of humans. This was my 127 minutes. A little background, Jokai is actually a forest set up to contain many of the rare species of flora of Assam to preserve their germplasm and help botanists do research. But given its far off nature, and lack of botanists in India, this place is perpetually empty except of adolescents coming here to hang out and escape their parents. All this while being right in the middle of Jokai district, which is quite famous for insurgency related talk in Indian armed forces. ...

Backpacking across upper Assam: Part 2/3

Hi I am the normal(ish) 21 year old engineer in Guwahati, Assam. And this the second part of my journey. thank you for making it this far. My journey veered towards Sibsagar , the ancient capital of Ahom Empire and the pot purri of Assamese culture. It is a very unassuming city, which to reach I took a window seat on a traveler. And then Mr. Murphy cared to weigh in, streaming a flock of children into the cramped traveler, much to the delight of goddess of misery, though I dare not complain, for obviously, people who hate children are categorized same as people who love children in a manner that Vladimir Nabokov would describe as natural. Yet this observation is not about my trials, though I will have more, because I found that even in this far of land, the gangrene of tetris loaded Gameboy exists. Even the sound is nostalgic. The place is quite quiet and I arrived and ran into my host family’s patriarch, who did not understand half of what I was saying, but given Mr. Ki...