December 13 – Demonstrators and the Drive to Guwahati

We had a slightly leisurely early morning so took a few more photos of our lovely hotel.

After lots of consultation with their home office and monitoring the protest situation our guides and Tara decided that we would leave for Guwahati at 2am.  That means we are skipping Shillong, Mawlynnong and Cherrpunjee.  Ad earlier we had missed seeing Gibbons and an orchid farm.  Of course, things change constantly and it was eventually decided to stay at the hotel until morning.

After much deliberation with Tara's local contacts it was decided to head out at 9:00am for Guwahati, instead of our next tour location.  The drive took us through a lot of tea plantations (Assam is world renown for their tea).

And we saw a lot of harvested rice on the roadsides, waiting to be thrashed.  

 We eventually ran into one major roadblock.  We managed to get around one really large roadblock, after Tara got out and had discussions with those "in charge".

When we ran into the next major roadblock things got really ugly.  These guys were particularly loud and angry.  They raged at our driver for taking tourists out when he knew there was a shutdown and then he slapped him in the face.  Our driver took it with grace and we turned around and found the nearest police station.  Tara managed to get us a police escort through the roadblock and to the town of Roha.

There they dropped us off at another police station.  After lunch and a lot of discussions Tara managed to convince the powers that be to give us a police escort to Guwahati, our destination today.  When we headed out there were about 8 or so tourist cars in the caravan.  

The police were great.  Each car would take us to the edge of their district where there was another car waiting to take us onward.  Most of the places we didn't even have to stop.  It was a seamless, rolling transfer.  We had only one instance where the police had to get out of their vehicle to break up a roadblock.

After arriving in Guwahati, Tara consulted with her contact who strongly suggested we get out of the area.  So we cut the tour short by four days and will fly back to Delhi tomorrow.