Meghalaya Trip 2 – Shillong

At that time, the location of the hotel on Google Maps was shown somewhere near a small town called Nongstoin (West Khasi Hills) and we made the journey accordingly. Nongstoin turned out to be a small crappy town but the worse part was that the Google Maps was wrong yet again. The actual location of our planned destination was near Shillong, about a 100 km away. Now as I check it, the location has been updated to the actual coordinates. But at that time, we felt pretty annoyed. We thought about spending the night in Nongstoin and then move on to Shillong and Cherrapunji. There were no hotels and the only state run guest house was big but wifey didn’t like it.  So we started looking for some other place to stay.

We made some calls to the tourist department and they told us about 1 hotel 30-35 km away, Someone from the hotel was nearby and he said that he could meet and take us there as the actual location of hotel was on top of a hill in a wooded area with just a trail going there, But he couldn’t meet us and we never saw the landmark he told us to watch for on the way. So we had no choice at the time except to reach Shillong for the night. We reached there and I was pretty annoyed at everyone. Atleast the hotel there had hot running water, electricity and other utilities which worked properly. Hotel didn’t have dinner ready, so we went out to have something to eat and see the city.

 Compared to humid  West Garo Hills area, Shillong was comparatively cooler. We walked around looking for a place to eat. I was looking for local cuisine, but majority pf the restaurants just had the usual Chinese, south-Indian, north-Indian kind of stuff. There were a few signboards for bars but all were closed down after imposition of prohibition. People in villages were brewing their own booze (something like a fruit wine called bicchhi) and drinking it clandestinely and I suppose alcohol was available in black market in cities too. After a bit of walk, we found a small Naga food joint. The menu was rather limited and consisted mostly of 3-4 fish, pork and vegetable dishes with rice in different combinations. Wifey didn’t eat anything there though. I also bought a bottle of Naga chilli pickle from there. Only way I can eat it is by pouring 3-4 drops of the brine/oil in a large plate of rice. Eating the actual chilli makes whole mouth go numb and ass on fire next morning. Anyone reading this is welcome to to taste it.

We spent another day there and but didn’t like the Shillong city that much. If anything, parts of it like Police Bazar looked more like Mumbai rather than a charming hill city. It’s expanding too much, hills are being dug out, trees vanishing and ugly concrete buildings and shacks popping up everywhere, Traffic is as bad as any other big city but the drivers there don’t overtake in a jam or slow traffic as impatient idiots in rest of India do. It’s mostly because the roads are only double laned and overtaking in jam is a sure way of making thee situation even worse. So people actually follow the rules and don’t make it worse. Unfortunately rest of India lacks this basic common sense.

One interesting thing about the traffic in Shillong is the local taxis. These are mostly small cars like Maruti-800, Zen, Alto type and ply inside city limits. Normally 5 adults can sit in such a car in an uncomfortable cramped way. But these taxis regularly carry 10-12 people. Even the drivers seat has a passenger sharing it and 2-3 on the other one. Back seat will have 4-7 passengers more. How more people don’t die in such an arrangement and cars don’t breakdown in middle of street will remain a mystery. They’re pretty cheap though. Rs 10 -30 (maybe) for most local journeys per person and Rs 100 if you want the whole for yourself. We paid 100 whenever we needed it. Only one taxi driver tried to charge more during our stay there.

Next day, we visited Laitlum Canyons, a few km outside Shillong city limits and an interesting place which reminded me of Silent Hill. Once we passed the parking, everything was covered in fog with visibility of 4-5 meters at best. The place was essentially just a grass covered hill with fog everywhere. A slight drizzle and strong wind could do nothing to increase visibility.  A paved path went downwards but we didn’t feel like taking it at the time with rain and low visibility. There are pictures on internet which show the place without any fog and mist, but we liked it better this way. Some locals were gathering grass and digging up earth to presumably to plant something.

On the way back there by a old wood and grass building which was the residence of a local king. Driver asked if we wanted to see it but we drove to the Air Force museum. It was a smaller museum than Goa’s Naval Aviation Museum with the usual Hunter, Mig-21 and some other planes like trainers, transports in one section. Other section had an old Mi-4 helicopter, SAM and scale models of various planes on display. The indoor section had some stuff about history of the place, wars, local war heroes and the usual bombs, missiles etc. But the most impressive thing was a fully armed Jaguar on display on the main road outside air force station.

 In evening, we were searching again for some place to eat and entered one Maniupri restaurant in top floor of an old house. It was owned and operated by an artist family. At that time, they had a very limited menu. So i asked for some salad and one more dish which looked like a yellow, dry barfi but was spicy and salty. The salad was mostly cabbage along with some other veggies, spices but had something really with a strong smell and flavour., so I asked them what was in it. They said it was dried fish. Normally wifey will always take 1-39 bites out of whatever vegetarian stuff I’m eating but luckily for her, that time she had not. Previous night, she had ordered a vegetarian chop-suey in a Chinese place. After a long wait, waiter brought the bowl with a a huge omelet on  top which she didn’t like at all. Perks of being a vegetarian in a non-vegetarian place. :)