Summer in Nagaland: Roads and clouds

If you enjoy summer rain and clouds and if you are also a bit of a wild adventurer and a lover of "rough and dangerous" terrain, this is probably the best season to tour the hills and villages of Nagaland to soak your Hunting Boots (but totally against hunting) or rubber chappals in mud and experience extremely heavy downpours clobbering corrugated iron roofs with raindrops as big as juicy local plums. You can take a bus, Sumo or hire a private taxi. Shared Sumo taxi works good for me: less fuel consumption per head, good for environment/Mother Earth, co-passengers to help in case of a vehicle/mental break-down, enlightening conversations, occasional drunks with endless stories and hot mid-way local meals.

Thick fog covers the roads, hills and houses every other day this season like a white blanket with moving wispy tentacles. It is dangerous and a great strain for the eye to drive through cloud-shrouded roads  especially when the potholes-sculpted roads resemble volcanic craters and small and large landslides surprisingly greet you with big boulders, uprooted trees and eroded soil that guide you all the way to wherever your destination is within the State.

Despite the suicidal conditions of the road in many areas, i believe that humans still love an element of risk and dare in life, besides, it’s not like we’ve got great many options of commuting in this region. I won’t take a helicopter ride at this time of the year and get lost among the clouds forever. Geographically we are far away from the Bermuda Triangle. 

If anyone wishes to travel here this season and if you’d love to see hilly areas with thick jungles inhabited by ferocious-looking tribesmen and tribeswomen - there are no leaves skirts, skull-necklaces and head-hunting these days unfortunately but it will still be worth all the pain and inconvenience because there are over a hundred shades of green in all their leafy shapes and sizes, scenes of blue-green hills drowned in oceans of cottony clouds, spectacular sunsets and the peak season for lots of lots of rain, mud (chemical-pollution-less, we can mud-wrestle), bugs and bug-songs, cicada-songs 24/7, plums, water-plums, peaches, pears, chillies, beans, cucumbers, wild edible leaves with medicinal properties, all organic. Traditionally, we love to over-feed our guests despite their polite protests and most locals usually like to entertain visitors and strangers in town - invite them to lunch and dinner for free over and over unlike a few other places. :-p

Btw, don’t worry about the state of the roads, you won’t die. How have locals here survived for centuries otherwise?