Having had a wonderful time in Cherrapunji, it was time to move on. With this North Eastern part of India not being on the tourist trail, travel options were a little more limited. Furthermore, some of the states require visitors to have permits to enter.
We were aware that the state of Manipur had introduced such permits as of January 1st this year (2020) and our research showed that we could get the permit at the state border.
One option available for us, was to travel back to Guwahati, from where we knew we could get a bus to Imphal.
As we didn’t want to go back on ourselves, we chose against this option.
The only other option was to push across country, eastwards towards Imphal and break the journey at Silchar, which is what we did.
From Lower Cherrapunji, we took a shared jeep back to Shillong, costing 100 Rupees each for the 2 hour journey. From where the jeep dropped us, we made our way back up the hill to Anjalee jeep stand, where we could get our next shared jeep to Khliehriat, a 3 hour journey for 170 Rupees each. At Khliehriat, it was across the road and straight into the next shared jeep to Kalain, a 4 hour journey, for 250 Rupees each. This last shared jeep journey was particularly picturesque.
On arrival at Kalain, we were rather stuck, we needed to get to the city of Silchar, as there was no accommodation in Kalain.
Fortunately for us, our jeep driver didn’t just dump us, he found us a shared minibus that would take us for the hour journey into Silchar, which cost us 100 Rupees each.
As Silchar was just an overnight stopover, we didn’t do any sightseeing while there.