Hornbill Festival & Kaziranga

We meet at Paltan Bazaar at 9:15 and head east on NH-37, past Nagaon and into Assam's tea country, with a stop for lunch on the way. It's about four hours to Kaziranga, where the road runs alongside the tea gardens at the park's edge. You arrive by mid-afternoon with nothing else planned: rest, eat early and pack your bag, because tomorrow starts in the dark.

The one early morning of the trip. We leave at 6:45 for the Central Range gate at Kohora, and at 7:30 the jeeps go in for about two hours through tall elephant grass, open grassland and shallow wetland, the home of the one-horned rhino. December mornings here are cool and often misty. Kaziranga holds most of the world's one-horned rhinos, so while nobody can promise a sighting, this is the place to try. Back for breakfast around ten, then about four hours on to Dimapur, the gateway to Nagaland.

A slower start. We leave Dimapur at nine and climb for about three hours into the hills to Kigwema, an Angami Naga village right next to Kisama, where the festival is held. You check in at a family-run homestay around noon and have the afternoon to walk the village lanes, the day before the festival opens and the crowds arrive.

The day the trip is built around. Kisama Heritage Village is laid out as a Naga village, with a morung, the traditional house, for each tribe. Through the day the arena fills with warriors in red and black, feathered headgear and spears, dancers, singers and drummers, with indigenous games in between, and the morungs serve food and sell crafts. Programmes usually run in a morning and an afternoon session. Stay on for the evening music if you like (tickets extra if the organisers charge), then it's a short ride home to Kigwema for dinner.

A morning away from the festival crowds. Khonoma is about an hour's drive, an Angami village of stone paths, old houses and terraced rice fields, known as Asia's first green village for the way it protects its forest. On the way back we stop at the Kohima War Cemetery, the memorial to the 1944 Battle of Kohima, laid out on the hillside in the middle of town. Late in the afternoon we return to Kisama for a second evening of performances and music.

After breakfast we leave Kigwema at eight and drive about three hours down to Dimapur. The trip ends at the railway station or the airport around 11:30, so book a flight after 1:30 pm or a train after 12:30 pm. Going home to the south or west? The "Getting there" plan below, through Guwahati, is the easy way.