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SevenUp 2023

An unusual trip to the Indian subcontinent for two months in Spring 2023 starting and ending in Kolkata.

We toured six of the so-called Seven Sisters, the seven states of northeast India: Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura, Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh.

Read on to learn how we fared.

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Trip Report and Budget

 

(vero;2023-July-14)

Planning our SevenUp23 trip has been difficult. The usual travel guides are quite superficial, dedicating too few pages to such a big region and are in part outdated (although Lonely Planet claims his last edition completely updated and revised 2022: for mainland India maybe, but surely not for the north east). The difficulty comes also from the fact that this region is hardly visited by foreign tourists (and if so, most do it with a guide and private car). We were starting the trip after two years of Covid crisis and this meant there were not many blogs from Westerners, the most recents dated 2019, and the others we found were from Indian bloggers who tend to travel in groups or with a private car. The planning phase was all in all a very time consuming and sometimes frustrating affair but we managed well in the end; We had a good idea of what we wanted to see and were resolved to investigate all the unknown, particularly the transport connections, once on the ground. There were some positive news though: all states except Arunachal Pradesh are now permit free for foreigners, this made travelling easier, a good thing since securing the PAPs (Protected Area Permits) for Arunachal Pradesh was not so straight forward as we thought.

Final budget. We ended up spending an average of 1922 Rs (19£/22€) per day for the both of us, with an average cost of Rs1090 (11£/13€) per night for a double room.We landed in Kolkata and after a night in the city boarded a night train to Guwahati (Assam), the gateway to the region. After a few days to get acclimatised we headed to Meghalaya, followed by Tripura, Manipur, Nagaland, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh, finishing in Guwahati before boarding a second night train back to Kolkata where we spent a few days before flying back home. You can retrace our route on this map showing our itinerary.

We were there for 58 days and managed on a budget of 1922 Rs (€22/£19) per day for the two of us. More than half of it was for accommodation (53.8%), then came local transport (22.5%), food (13%), fees (7.8%) and other assorted stuff (2.9%). This is much more than what we spent during our last trip in 2018: our daily average back then was 1173 Rs for the two of us, an increase of 64%, mainly due to a rise of inflation, a significant increase in the price of accommodation (nearly double to what we paid in 2018) and a lot of ground covered by public transport.

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Hotels

During this trip, we dropped our bags in 23 different rooms; we used Booking.com to book eight of them (Kolkata 2x, Guwahati 2x, Shillong, Imphal, Kohima and Majuli), we found the rest on the ground and the only town where we had really a hard time finding something "cheap" without booking ahead was when we returned to Guwahati. Our accommodation budget turned out to be quite expensive compared to what we were used to in the past: we paid an average of 566 Rs in 2018, this year it was 1034 Rs. This may have to do with the region in itself: it is not difficult to find cheap hotels in touristy states like Rajasthan, Kerala or Goa, but in the north east they are very scarce. And if cheaper, they often do not accept foreigners who are often too demanding and involve too much paperwork and contact with the police: not worth the effort.

Be aware that many hosts on Booking.com request an advance payment via bank transfer, which is not possible for us foreigners: make sure to contact your hotel of choice upfront or after the booking to make sure this is not an issue for them. We never had any problem but it is a matter of trust between you and your host.

Our most expensive room was at the YWCA in Kolkata with 1500 Rs shared, the cheapest was in Agartala with 850 Rs attached. See a summary below:

List of our hotels with price and comments.

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FoodA menu in an eatery in Shillong. A menu in an eatery in Shillong.

As usual, our diet is very simple… mostly vegetable thalis in the evening, snacks, biscuits or crackers during the day, the occasional Indian sweet before going to bed, purified water and if fizzy drink, local brand only. No alcohol. A typical vegetable thali, first serving. A typical vegetable thali, first serving.We have breakfast in our room, preparing our own tea and boiling water with a heating coil, munching some biscuits or crackers with it. Pricewise, a vegetable thali will typically cost anything between 70 and 120 Rs (except in Kohima where prices started at 250 Rs although we were lucky to find Ali and his Rice Hotel who charged 100 Rs and where we had our dinner every day). We were pleasantly surprised to find that all thalis in the north east come with refill, a big difference to what we had experienced during our last Indian trip in 2018 when thalis were served as one plate only… When in Kolkata, we grew very fond of the famous Kathi Rolls, typical street food of the city. Prepared with all kinds of fillings, they became our standard evening food.

Transport (see our separate page for a detailed report with prices and comments)

After everything Vero had read about transport in the north east while planning the trip, it turned out to be not so bad as dreaded although it was a defining feature of this trip. The issue is that distances are huge and travel takes a lot of time on roads which are not always up to the job (to say the least). We used public transport throughout and this involved a mix of night and day trains, an overnight bus, local buses, Wingers (mini-buses) and Sumos (sort of a land-rover taking 11+ passengers).

When possible, we tried to use trains as much as possible, which worked perfectly within the state of Tripura, but the choice was limited for the rest of our itinerary. Most memorable were our overnight bus journey from Shillong to Agartala, the awful state of the roads in Manipur, the many roadworks in Assam as well as the tiring and long Sumo journeys in Arunachal Pradesh. Transport has been so important during this trip that we have a separate page dealing with it.

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Fees

They make up 7.8% of our total budget and the bulk of it is for the fee paid to obtain our PAPs (Protected Area Permit) for Arunachal Pradesh: 2500 Rs per person. It was not an easy process…

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Miscellaneous

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Want to read more? Go back to Introduction or go on to Some Planning Links or go up to Blog


$ updated from: Blog.htxt Fri 16 Aug 2024 15:40:09 trvl2 — Copyright © 2024 Vero and Thomas Lauer unless otherwise stated | All rights reserved $