North-East Trip: Kamakhya Temple

The Kamakhya Temple is a Shakti Temple situated on the Nilachal Hill in the western part of Guwahati city in Assam, India. It is an important pilgrimage destination for Hindu and Tantric worshippers. This was our next destination, so we hopped on a local bus and made our way to the base of the hill from where we took a shared Tata Sumo up to the Temple. After alighting from the vehicle, the final walk up to the temple on a stepped street which is lined with shops, selling not only items used for worship, but other trinkets too. On your way up we encountered a couple of Tantric Babas, several priests, lines of beggars with bowls and quite a few goats too.

Once inside the temple complex, we were amazed to see the throngs of worshippers queued up to enter the inner sanctum of the temple to offer their prayers. It is a place of pilgrimage and people from all over the country come here to offer prayers. We were just glad to see the madness from the outside and made our way back on a bus into the city.

We got off at the banks of the river Brahmaputra where there were several make shift bamboo jetties and watched the boat ferry service transporting people on their way back from work as the sun was setting.

Our Guwahati sight seeing was done. We had an early start to Tezpur and Bomdila the next day.

North-East Trip: Guwahti Zoo

Once we got to Guwahati and checked into our Hotel, we headed out to the Guwahati Zoo. We did have half a day to kill in Guwahati and decided since we were here, we might as well check out some places that we had researched and were worth seeing here. Our love for animals also made this a must see. Once at the Guwahati Zoo, we were amazed to see how wonderfully it had been made; it was less zoo and more like a sanctuary. The zoo is built on a hill side and basically the animals get a natural habitat with just a wall or moat around them. Even the Birds had cages that were reaching the sky with huge trees inside.

It took us a couple of hours to get around and we didn’t even see the entire Zoo, but the sign on the way out says it all.