Guwahati, North East India

What a big mic mac since I am here, no one off the streets speaks sufficient English to have any conversation. In my hotel, no one speaks any English at all, communication is a nightmare. When you ask for something they always pretend understanding you, but they never provide the service you ask for. After a while it really gets annoying and after a longer while you get used to it and do not rely on any service what so ever, you do every thing by your own.
People here are very kind and quite educated, but the city is a total wreck.
Here in Guwahati, the city center is filled with a nauseous smell, homes do not have any bathrooms and people do what they need to do on the roads. Bins do not exist, there only is some times three brick walls of ~ 1m high in which people sometimes dump there trash.
I suppose there is only three walls and not for so that the bin will never be fulled up.
Around those rare bins, breathing has become unbearable.
This city is really poor, you can see on the railways a lot of different commerces and people walk on the railway leading to the train station as if it were a normal path.
Guwahati really did not have much to do, so I decided to leave for Shillong, known as the Scotland of the East because of its very green landscapes and its similarities with the Scottish highlands.
So I took a Sumo car (4x4) that I shared with s3 other Indian people, it was a ride that lasted three in a half hours. Luckily the roads were OK and this ride was more fun than anything else, even though nobody in the car with me would speak English, they all had a shot to talk to me. Where are you from? What is your good name? ...?
This beautiful city of Shillong is slightly in altitude and from there you can see beautiful and huge waterfalls when there is the monsoon.
In Shillong I met up with a French exchange student studying at the IIT of Guwahati for a semester. We decided to travel together for a couple of days as he was on vacation travelling around the North Eastern states.
So we travelled together in another shared sumo to Cherrapunji, the world's rainiest location where it may rain 1.5m a day for several days in a row. We found a charming little hotel in the middle of the jungle.
From this location we had a magnificent view on the marshy land of Bangladesh.
In the hotel we met up with two people from Tcheque Republic who were here to collect insects and they told us that it was not the first time that they come and that in this region of the world they would discover about 10 news species every month. Unbelievable!
The next day we decided to go for a hike in the neighborhood, it was a nine hour hike up and down many hills and really tiring especially that we had forgotten our lunch pack and that there was no place to stop for lunch. Luckily we had enough Coke, so we were burning this sugar. Anyway, this hike was one of the most beautiful one I have ever done.
On our way there was many waterfalls, amongst which was the highest one in Asia, there were root bridges which I must explain to you.
These are bridges that are mad strictly out of living trees. Roots grow and they, thanks to little human help, cross over streams and rivers which may reach up to 20m wide.
One of the root bridge is even a double decker and you can walk on the two levels.
These bridges take approximately 35 years to grow because nature takes time.
At night when we got back to the hotel, we were starving and we both ate so first thing, before even washing the liters of sweat we were carrying on our skin, we ate like pigs and stuffed food so quickly up our mouth that it only took us a couple seconds to be full. But we needed it.
At night a group of 5 singers with one guitar player came to our hotel to play local songs. The Indian tourists started to dance on the least rhythmic songs I have heard in a while and dragged me in the dance. It was really fun because they introduced me to a couple Indian moves.