Arunachal & Kaziranga — Tawang, Dirang and the Rhino Grassland

East along the Brahmaputra through tea country, around four to five hours to Kaziranga, which runs for fifty kilometres along the river's south bank. Elephant grass, marsh and shallow beels, flooded and renewed each year by the river. It has been protected since 1905 and now holds roughly two-thirds of the world's greater one-horned rhino. The evening is free after the drive.

An early safari across the grassland, where rhino graze in the open at first light and wild buffalo and swamp deer are near-certain. Then north, crossing the Brahmaputra and the state line into Arunachal Pradesh, where the Inner Line Permit is checked. The road climbs steadily through Bhalukpong and Bomdila into the Monpa country, reaching Dirang at about 1,600 m in the evening. It is a long day and the second half of it is mountain road.

The day the trip exists for. The road climbs to the Sela Pass at around 4,170 m, snow-bound for much of the year and holding a lake just below the top that freezes solid in winter. Beyond it, Jaswant Garh commemorates a rifleman of the 1962 war with China, and Nuranang falls drop about a hundred metres a little further on. Into Tawang at about 3,000 m in the afternoon. The pass closes without warning for snow and the whole itinerary is built knowing that.

Tawang Monastery was founded in the 1680s and is the largest in India and the second largest in the world, home to several hundred monks of the Gelug school, with an eight-metre gilded Buddha in its assembly hall and a library of manuscripts. Urgelling just below the town is where the sixth Dalai Lama was born in 1683. The afternoon takes the Ani Gompa nunneries and the war memorial above the town, which commemorates the Indian dead of 1962.

North toward the frontier, where a string of glacial lakes — Sangetsar among them, still widely called Madhuri Lake after a film shot there — sit above four thousand metres in country that was fought over in 1962 and remains sensitive. This excursion needs a further permit beyond the Inner Line, is granted by the army on the day, and is refused whenever the border or the weather requires it. When it is not running, the Tawang valley's villages and the Gorsam Chorten fill the day instead.

Re-crossing the Sela, which in clear weather is a different pass in the other direction, and dropping through Jang and Dirang toward Bomdila at around 2,400 m. The Bomdila monastery belongs to the Gelug school and looks out over the Kameng valley; the apple and kiwi orchards around the town are a surprise in this landscape. It is a long driving day and the itinerary asks nothing else of it.

The long descent out of the Himalaya through Bhalukpong and back across the Brahmaputra to Guwahati — most of the day, and a striking transition from high pass to river plain within a few hours. Into the city in the evening. Kamakhya on Nilachal hill is worth the visit if there is light and appetite left, though after a week of mountain roads most people would rather not.

To the airport, which is on the far bank of the Brahmaputra from the city centre, so the river crossing has to be built into the timing. If the flight is late enough, the Assam State Museum holds a strong sculpture and textile collection and the Kalakshetra complex gives a good survey of the region's cultures — either is a reasonable last couple of hours.