mountainside ski & sports SATRAS A satra is a monastery for Vishnu worship, Assam s distinctive form of everyman Hinduism. For

Tripura s most iconic building, the 1930 Neermahal, is a long, red-and-white water palace (admission/camera/video 10/10/25; h8.30am-4pm, until 4.30pm Apr-Sep), which is empty but shimmering on its own boggy island in the lake of Rudra Sagar. Like its counterpart in Rajasthan s Udaipur, this

DON T MISS There aren t all that many places left in the world where the maps may as well have blank spaces on them, snow- capped mountains mountainside ski & sports remain unnamed and unclimbed, forests are filled with creatures that scientists have yet to lay eyes upon and hill tops are crowned with unmolested mountainside ski & sports tribal villages, but northeast India is one such place. As the region slowly opens up, don t miss this opportunity for genuine, undiluted adventure. Areas that are safe yet largely unexplored by tourists include almost all of rural Mizoram, mountainside ski & sports large tracts of Tripura (check the security situation first), the furthest reaches of Nagaland and, best of all, huge chunks of steamy mountainside ski & sports forests, alpine meadows and high Himalayan wildernesses have finally started opening up in Arunachal Pradesh. Top Festivals

The ASTC bus station (cnr AT & Temple Rds) has frequent services to Jorhat ( 35 to 45, one hour), Dibrugarh ( 51 to 69, two hours), Tezpur ( 189, five hours), Guwahati ( 310 to 390, eight hours, frequent from 7am).

SATRAS A satra is a monastery for Vishnu worship, Assam s distinctive form of everyman Hinduism. Formulated by 15th-century Assamese philosopher Sankardev, the faith eschews the caste system mountainside ski & sports and idol worship, focussing on Vishnu as God, especially in his Krishna incarnation. Much of the worship is based around mountainside ski & sports dance and melodramatic play-acting of scenes from the holy Bhagavad Gita. The heart of any satra is its namghar, a large, simple, prayer hall usually open sided and shaped mountainside ski & sports like an upside-down oil tanker. Beneath the eastern mountainside ski & sports end, an inner sanctum hosts an eternal flame, the Gita and possibly a horde of instructive (but not divine) images.