February 22, 2012
The road to Haflong to meet Charu and Kuldeep was another hell of a ride! We wondered if we were going to have a repeat of our Nepal exiting experience since there seemed to be lack of a highway although people and damn Google Maps said otherwise! It was about 200 kilometers of pure refined hell, a total bike breaker. The entire road was under construction, so it was a 200 kilometers of construction site. We kept pushing hard , didn’t take any lunch or water break because we knew every minute was important. This is not the safest area and even the army doesn’t move without escort. But when we did reach Haflong, Kuldeep met us at a prominent chowk where he met us in a Gypsy and then took us to the mess where we stayed. Ahhh.. it was heaven when we got there! The next few days, Kuldeep and Charu treated us to food and drink and even restored our faith in pork and got us to try the local rice liquour which was definitely an acquired taste! It looked like lassi so it was greatly deceiving at the first sip, kinda had an aftertaste like sake (which makes sense). The next few days we spent enjoying the cool breeze and warming sun, badminton in the evenings (my hand-eye coordination is so crap now), and yummy chicken and ginger momos. Basically every single piece of clothing we had needed to be washed including the wet clothes from Gangtok that we had never had a chance to re-wash (eww)! There’s not much to see in Haflong but the company was all we needed, it was definitely worth it to come there!
It took us a few days to muster the courage to get back out on the road after days of being spoiled, but we decided we’d go to Aizwal (Mizoram) and then Agartala (Tripura) and possibly get a Bangladesh visa at the latter and cut across so it would get us to Kolkata faster. If we wouldn’t go through Bangladesh we’d have to do the loop again back through Assam, Bihar etc. As per our usual luck the road was absolute crap and we decided enough was enough. Nick and I both broke around the same time we decided to turn around to the closest city, Silchar, still in Assam. Then we saw a goat being dragged to death by a truck (unintentionally) and that was the cherry on top. The bike was taking too much beating and we still had to get out of India and explore. We also couldn’t trust local’s advice on the road because to them, it was a great road…yeah…for a 4×4 and if you want to be sore the next day! Shillong (Meghalaya) was too far so we made our night halt and hoped for the best the next day.
We got up in the morning and gathered our confidence and boosted each other’s morale and headed towards Shillong…come on India…give us a break, please?!
