Shillong

You’d think you’d get used to it. Or at least bear it head held high. If not, at least you’d be able to endure it with not more than a surrendering shrug, just like you’d accept a daily, painful shot that you know would make you feel better. But the Asian heat is still a treacherous, ruthless enemy that will make your skin prickle and your eyelids grow heavier. Your body takes twice the amount of time to get from point A to point B, and requires more rest than usual, so your energy level goes down quicker than a stone in a pond. And there’s no need to go to a remote desert in order to experience this; it’s enough to be somewhere in India. Almost anywhere…

Well, this time the heat attacked while we were in Guwahati, the biggest city in the North-Eastern states of India, a less visited area, but with a great many natural attractions, one of them possibly being this unreasonable weather. Talk about monsoon… hmm, must be wreaking havoc... somewhere else because it obviously never heard of this place.

One look at the map showed that the heat would at least interrupt its violent spasms in the North-Eastern state of Meghalaya, just a few hours away but – hopefully – at a higher altitude and, therefore, closer to some colder weather (if this logical statement seems flawed and doesn’t make any sense, it’s because it is and it doesn’t; but there’s more than one way to reassure myself of something and this one was the handiest one available for my overloaded brain).

And that’s how this new overcrowded jeep took us to Shillong. And the sunny weather suddenly changed, becoming a massive vertical sea, so much so that even when we stopped for lunch, no one wanted to get out in the heaving rain. That made it difficult to get out, as we were surrounded by reluctant Indians who didn’t want to get wet and who certainly didn’t even consider getting out, even just for a moment, so that we could sprint towards the sheltering roof of the restaurant.

Onwards then, with damp clothes and armpits raised, so that the jeep soon became too small a place to inhabit along 10 other people (11, if you count the kid stretched on his mother’s and my lap). When confronted with heavy rain, all the windows are closed shut and the air inside the vehicle becomes sparser, thinner, and with a slight tinge to it that can make the weaker ones wish they better had walked barefoot all the way to their destination. On burning coals.

Pretty, posh Shillong had a great vibe to it and we were quite excited to find a nice place to stay and explore the busy streets filled with tourists, underpants sellers and balloon inflators – yes, a nice variety of goods are sold on the streets of Shillong, the items listed above being the most common I’ve seen. Alas, Shillong cannot pride itself with a wide choice of affordable guest houses and, asking around, we were pointed towards another area of the city, on another hill, not really within walking distance, especially when burdened by an assortment of backpacks and bags (between the two of us, we were carrying 4 backpacks and a handbag; also, some bags with fruit and a bottle of water). We took the local bus to this new, unpronounceable area only to discover that we were pointed towards the top end of available accommodations, so we ended up going back to where we started some 3 hours earlier.

By night-time we settled for a lovely cockroach-infested matchbox-sized room somewhere in an underground crypt and we decided we’d better go for a nice, really long stroll, so that the time spend in the cellar would be as short as possible.

The main thing about irony is that it always strikes when you least expect it and in this case, it struck about 10 minutes after we filled in all the check-in papers: a mere 15m further down the street another subsurface hotel would have offered us a room with a smaller number of permanent inhabitants of the cockroach persuasion, a bigger surface (to accommodate the guests alongside the bugs), and at a better price. We ended up finding the local bar…