My First ever solo trip (Part-2)
4 friends from 4 States
If you’ve missed the first part you can read it here.
We were continuing our climb and in the meantime, my usual “absence of mind” character played again. I left my phone in the shop we stopped for drinking. So, I have to “run” back a few hundred steps to reach there and picked the phone. Now, I’ve to climb those steps to catch up to my guys since I told them not to wait for me. So I turned on my mobile data, maxed my phone volume, and started playing “Thalai viduthalai” from the epic movie “Vivegam” 😂
But honestly, it gave me some boost. So, before even the song ended I reached and saw those buggers “supposedly waiting for me” by sitting on each corner of the step. I rested for a few mins and all I could think of was to reach the top before the sunset. Then made everyone start our journey. Later played Blood bath from internationally acclaimed Asuran. I wrapped my towel over my head, had a somewhat similar stick on my hand that started moving fast.
The right music can give you both calmness and the required boost for your morale.
When we reached the top the sun has already set. Pooja was completely exhausted as she even vomited in the middle a couple times, Tuhina was about to faint, and Sheri looked so weak due to blood loss. We immediately started back to our rooms. On the way towards the homestay, Tuhina told me she was feeling nauseated. So, we stopped the car and made her get down from the car to get some fresh air. On other hand, Pooja was having a heavy headache. So, I was sitting in the middle of two sick girls and had to cater to them both 💁
As soon as we reached our homestay, Pooja got down and started vomiting. Sheri has to run to help her and I made sure Tuhina didn’t see anything and asked her to go to her room.
I was surprisingly active for the entire trek. Everybody including me was curious about that 😂. Obviously, I had leg pain too but still, I wasn’t that tired. So, after a while and taking bath and all, I went to the girls’ room to order food for them. As an authentic South Indian guy, I suggested they should eat something light like idly. Since idly wasn’t available I got them a dosai. I have to talk to the homestay manager and he was very helpful in arranging the food for the girls. Meanwhile, I ordered the local special chicken curry and a few rotis.
Tuhina had puked once in the meantime, and pooja started to sleep. So when the food came I have to wake them up and literally prepare them to eat. Pooja, the bugger initially refused to eat and I had to compel her to eat at least one dosai. Now, with the drama queen, I have to convince her to just eat one piece of dosai. Do I look like a nurse to you girls? 🧐🤨
While I was trying to convince Tuhina, I was hearing mochuk, mochuk sound from my side, turns out the Delhi girl was devouring the dosai like a beast eating its meat 😂
Tuhina again puked and this time when she came out of the bathroom, she looked terrified. She was damn sure she got jaundice and she is going to die here in this homestay. I was trying hard not to laugh out of pity but once everyone heard this they too started laughing 😂😂😂
The reason she told was even more hilarious, it happened around 15 years ago when her friend shifted from West Bengal to Chennai and in a few months got jaundice because he drank some contaminated water. Now, she also feels she is having jaundice! Everyone started to roast her and finally, Sheri arranged a call with his sister who is ortho by profession, and she assured that she is not having jaundice. I told her to eat something, only then she will get normal.
Normally, when you push your body too hard within a short span of time, you will feel dizzy and nauseated. Because I’ve gone through all of them when I was in fitness training. Once you eat something the body will regain its energy.
Pooja, after her one dosai became normal i.e. went back to her craziness. Tuhina firmly told me she will only recover only if she at least smells a bit of dal. What a strange body! So I ordered dal and some rice for her, mixed it up, and gave it to her. After a few spoons itself, she regained her strength to smile and indulge in conversations with us.
Since all of us were tired, we all went to sleep early. But my body was hell-bent against sleeping. I tried different positions and not even a min of sleep. So around 12 AM or something I decided to wrap myself with the bedsheets like a Malaiyoor Mambatiyan and walk in front of the homestay😂
I was walking like a ghost in front of the building with a dead silence around me. Later in the morning, I realized that there is a big burial ground not far away from the homestay 🥶🤯
It took me another one hour of walking and a few Ilayaraja songs to bring sleep to my eyes and finally rest them.
Day 4 — the second best experience
We all woke up fresh in the morning. I took extra time to wake up, checked out of our homestay, and started towards Dawki river, where we are going to camp for the night.
On the way, we visited a few places like single root bridge, India’s cleanest village Mawlynnong. Imagine the cleanliness is so rare in India we need to pay 200 to visit the cleanest village! It’s time we rethink the kind of development we want. Later, we visited the India-Bangladesh border, which is split by the Dawki river. There were many scenic places en route.
We reached the Dawki river in the late afternoon and all of us decided we should do boating in the river. Honestly, it’s been years since I did boating. If my memory is right, the last time I did boating was when I visited Coorg during college IV which is around 6 years back! God!! time flies!
So, back to the boating. The slow and calm water is as terrifying as beautiful. You can trust the calm and clean water since you don’t know the depth of the water and boats are also not some “modern” ones, they all looked slightly better than what we say in Tamil as kattu maram.
It will be a 15 min boat ride and we will reach a shore where there will be shops and you can also take pictures and stay there for a few minutes to enjoy nature and then you can come back in the same boat to the place you where you started.
A few more pics to give you a gist of it, Medium doesn’t have a slideshow option it seems
We then visited Bangladesh too 😉😌
Yes, you read that right. We went inside Bangladesh without any passport and visa and came back without any harm 😜
Ami tomake bhalobasi Bangladesh ❤️
The sun has set by then, and we started our journey to the camp at the banks of river Dawn, a few kilometers away from the border. For restrooms, we have to walk a couple of meters and apart from that the camp was really good. I loved it! The tour guys did some screwups, so we didn’t have a barbecue, and we had to argue to at least include a campfire. This was the major screw-up we faced in the entire trip.
We finished our dinner in the nearby cafe, meanwhile, Pooja has to check her emails. Thank god, they had a laptop charging facility in the cafe. Until she checked all her emails, she was acting like someone else. Not the crazy woman we got used to seeing. Some sincere, work mode girl we didn’t like. Once, the emails are checked, she became normal (crazy) 😜
We then headed to the camp and the camp guys brought the logs and lit the fire. We had our small talks.
After a while, Pooja went inside the camp to sleep. Right from the beginning, she wasn’t into this camp stuffs. She never liked it. Her highness needed a royal camp where she will get a 6" mattress, charging ports, washrooms, etc. I told her then it is not a camp but a homestay. 😂
Some time into our conversation, Tuhina looked at the river and said,
“Wow, look at this view. So beautiful isn’t it na?”
I saw that, and all I can think about is Rambo 2, where he will be infiltrating the Vietnamese camp. The view was exactly like that and reminded me of that great movie
When I told her, she and Sheri looked at me with terrified eyes. Me? I was still thinking about that scene and even shooting my own ambush scene.
“How romantic and nice it is and all you can think was blood and killing ah Kaavian?”, she told with some disgust in her eyes.
I didn’t mind her. I was still shooting my Rambo scenes with either Vikram, Arya, or Vishal in my mind.
The other two buggers also went to sleep and I was alone near the campfire. I wasn’t sleepy at all. Those who were camping were still at the campfire and I was all alone 😒
Day 5 — the water activities
I got really pissed off about my guys. I was thinking that we would stay for a long time and have some fun. After wandering here and there in the tent I went to sleep by 1:00 AM or something. I kept my alarm on at 5:30AM because I wanted to see the sunrise and till then never woke up before the sun rose. Unfortunately, the mountain covered our view and I couldn’t witness the sunrise.
I and Sheri woke up and was having a few chitchats. Right from the start, Sheri was sceptical about my history. Yes, I deliberately hid a few things and I decided I’ll let him know by now. That was the final piece missing in our bond and now it’s all set 😂
Later the girls woke up, came out of their tent. Pooja was again ranting about her experience and Tuhina told she didn’t sleep properly.
Then Why the hell did you guys went to sleep early huh? — my mind
As usual, we all sat in the boys’ tent for a while and had little chitchats.
Then, we had a little walk over the hanging bridge. It was scary to walk over that bridge because most of the floor is rusty and in some places they used wooden planks to support the metal flooring. In fact, one such metal floor cranked when we stepped on it. It must be something around 40 to 50 high. But the view was fantastic.
If you guys have watched Apocalypse Now and Predator, you can definitely relate the view.
After our breakfast, we all assembled for Kayaking. I was particularly more interested since I craved to do kayaking. We put on our life jackets and jumped (not literally) into our boats. Sheri got “her highness”, and I paired with “grandma”.
Most part of the kayaking it was me and Sheri who paddled their boats 😂
The water as I said before was calm so paddling wasn't that hard. We reached the place where we do cliff jumping. I was hoping that would be some high grounds, turns out it’s something boulder over the banks of the river.
I used to jump from the motor shed top my well in our native, this is just a piece of cake for me. I did what we call here as kadapara neechal i.e. jumping straight into the water like a spear. I wanted to dive but never did that before from that height. So came down to a relatively lower cliff and jumped. Not a good dive though, but enjoyed it. I and Sheri enjoyed that to the core.
Meanwhile, the princess and the grandma were just chilling on the rocks. I had to convince them hard to get into the water. I didn’t want them to miss this fun. Finally, after much convincing and a little bit of pushing from the back😜 they got into the water.
As I rightly predicted they enjoyed swimming with the life jackets on. They enjoyed it so much that Pooja went to the center of the river while I and Sheri again went to the top for a dive. I didn’t hear both Pooja and Tuhina shouting at us asking for help as I was keen on making a clean dive. I did it though,
Here is the pic of Sheri and I dragging both girls from the water 😂
Then we came to the shore, dried up, and started our journey back to Shillong. The one thing I have to say about Meghalaya was that they have nice roads. Although most of the journey was on highways, considering 60% of them were on mountains, it was well laid. Taking about highways, one thing that pissed me really hard was how they were laying those roads. They’re breaking down an entire f**king mountain!. From a distance, it looked like they shaved a portion of a mountain.
All of this is for a 4 lane road between India and Bangladesh Remember, this is not for some ambulance use or something, mostly because of the cargo movement. Imagine what could happen if someone proposes to break down the entire mountain in Tamil Nadu? The sheer destruction we bring to nature in the name of development is really alarming.
After 2 to 3 hours of journey, we reached our stay in Shillong. The moment when I got down I was impressed, they were having TinTin’s image carved in wooden planks. The stay’s name was Rock Cliff Homestay. It was actually the ancestral home of the owner. The people in the stay were soo humble they showed us our room and walked us through the entire homestay. I fell in love with that place. Usually, I love historic places and always dreamt of living in a colonial era buildings and that dream came true that day.
There were a lot of photos and each of them told a story about many things. I was wondering how much the owner has to put in to maintain this house. I came down and saw the early 60's Willy Wagon sitting on the porch!. That was a 7 seater 4x4 SUV and later the owner of the homestay told me that it has a We were chilling, danced, laughed till the evening after that we went shopping. To be honest I was shocked when I saw the price of the products there. Everything is too costly and they’re literally looting the tourists there. The girls went to a local shop to buy a boot for them and that shop bhaiya without any hesitation told 3500 bucks! I was like I could buy a branded shoe in that price range. Later, Pooja showed me that the price of that boot was just 800 on Amazon. If they price things ridiculously then how are we supposed to support the local shops huh? Later I bought a jerkin for my mom and a couple of mugs for myself and my brother. I couldn’t buy anything for my father because I didn’t see anything that he might use. Others bought a few items and we again came to our homestay.
We sat in the dining room and were having our usual chitchats. A lot of deeper conversations. After some time a guy came, I don’t exactly remember his name. It seems he was from the Assamese Mising tribe. He sat with us and sang a beautiful melody song. I didn’t even understand one single word in it but I loved the tune.
In this video, you can hear me saying that music doesn’t need a language. I don’t know why I said that there but now that I remember, it is 💯 true.
After having our dinner we stayed till midnight. We all wanted this day not to end because this is the last day we all going to stay together. I and Tuhina were even trying to convince the other two to extend the trip just to stay here. But unfortunately, these guys were having other plans. So went to sleep late in the night.
Day 6 — a pleasant surprise and departure
All of us woke up early and while we were having breakfast, the owner of the hotel came. He seemed to be a very humble person. He sat with us and we spoke a lot of things, surprisingly he even knew about the famous filter coffee of the South! Later he took us in his Willy Wagon to his home and showed us his entire collection.
He had around 50 cars, all vintage, and WWII era cars and he showed some of them standing on his porch. He had vintage scooters, bikes, fire engines, lots of portraits of leaders. He even had 19th-century muskets! It was like I’m living in a dream. His ancestors were part of the British Indian Army it seems and he told me a lot about the Battle of Kohima not far from where we stayed, which changed the course of World War II.
We talked about a lot of things and he was particularly interested in South Indian history too. I told him that I’ll share a few South Indian history books if I get hold of any. So we came back and took a few more pics inside the homestay and left for the day
So, we are towards the end of our end. We all packed up and started our journey towards Guwahati airport since mine was the first flight (4 PM), we were rushing. Thankfully there wasn’t much traffic and driver bhaiya reached on time.😌
My first ever solo trip to North and North East India ended with lots of memories and gaining 3 more good friends. As I said at the beginning of the 1st part itself that we never looked like a group of unknowns. Everyone bonded very well and hopefully we all 4 could do more such trips in the future.
Now that I reminisce on my Meghalaya days I realize that all 4 of us had very different personalities. If we were to compare ourselves then Pooja is the Phoebe of the gang — a crazy woman, Tuhina is the scaredy cat and grandma of our gang. I’m the Chandler of this group and Sheri was the guy who was balancing our group. I was never a guy who initiates a conversation nor the guy who goes to strangers and talks to them. I call myself an ambivert because I talk to people only with whom I vibe with. However, all four of us bonded within a few minutes of introduction and this thought me one thing
Life is unpredictable and cherish every moment in it!
Thanks a lot for sticking till the end and hope I haven’t bored you. Will see you guys in my next travel blog.
