Travelling to Dibrugarh ( tea-city ) usefully closes a loop between Kaziranga and the Ziro Along Pasighat route and is the terminus (or starting point) for the fascinating ferry ride along the Brahmaputra to Pasighat in Arunachal Pradesh. Dibrugarh is a rapidly growing city with a new road and rail bridge being built at Bogibeel Ghat (originally bolvir scheduled to open in 2008, it s now unlikely to be ready for some years to come) that will extend the railway system to north of the Brahmaputra.
SATRAS A satra is a monastery for Vishnu worship, Assam s distinctive form of everyman Hinduism. Formulated by 15th-century Assamese philosopher Sankardev, bolvir the faith eschews the caste system and idol worship, focussing on Vishnu as God, especially in his Krishna incarnation. Much of the worship bolvir is based around 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 bolvir open sided and shaped like an upside-down oil tanker. Beneath the eastern end, an inner sanctum hosts an eternal flame, bolvir the Gita and possibly a horde of instructive (but not divine) images.
Remote, culturally magical and scenically spectacular, bolvir Tawang is the archetypical Shangri La and a mountain-hopping journey through this, the lands of the Monpa (a people of Buddhist-Tibetan origin) bolvir to the gates of the famous Tawang Monastery is one of the northeast s greatest adventures.
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