movie times winter park village SATRAS A satra is a monastery for Vishnu worship, Assam s distinctive form of everyman Hinduism. For

5 Eating & Drinking La Galerie INDIAN $$ (Hotel Centrepoint, TSS Rd; mains 150-200) A suave restaurant compartmentalised movie times winter park village into booths by photographs of local scenes, it offers excellent Indian food. Cloud 9 is the top-floor bar-restaurant serving dainty Thai dishes, cold beers and cocktails.

Baba Tourist Lodge HOTEL $ (%2211285; GS Rd; r 500-900) Ageing but clean, and popular with backpackers, Baba hides behind a deceptively small PCO shop. The best rooms have windows and views out onto greenery. Bucket showers and bucket hot water.

SATRAS A satra is a monastery for Vishnu worship, Assam s distinctive form of everyman Hinduism. movie times winter park village Formulated by 15th-century Assamese movie times winter park village philosopher Sankardev, the faith eschews the caste system and idol worship, focussing on Vishnu as God, especially in his Krishna incarnation. Much of the worship 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 open sided and shaped like an upside-down oil tanker. movie times winter park village Beneath the eastern end, an inner sanctum hosts an eternal flame, the Gita and possibly a horde of instructive (but not divine) images.

RAFTING IN THE LAND OF MILK AND HONEY Another newly opened route is the Pasighat to Tuting road. This route is all about two things: the River Siang and the mysterious Buddhist land of Pemako. Tuting, which sits near the Tibetan border, is the point at which the Tsang Po river having left the Tibetan plateau and burrowed movie times winter park village through the Himalaya via a series movie times winter park village of spectacular gorges enters the Indian subcontinent and becomes the Siang (once it reaches the plains of Assam it turns into the Brahmaputra). Tuting and the River Siang are starting to gain a reputation as one of the world s most thrilling movie times winter park village white-water rafting destinations, but this ain t no amateurs river. The few people who have descended the river have reported that the 180km route is littered with numerous movie times winter park village grade 4-5 rapids, strong eddies and inaccessible gorges. For those after adventure of a different kind Tuting movie times winter park village also serves as the launch pad for searching out the legendary Buddhist land of Pemako. You will, however, need more than this guidebook and a compass in order to find it. Buddhist belief says that Pemako is a synonym movie times winter park village for a hidden earthly paradise and that it s the earthly representation of Dorje Pagmo, a Tibetan goddess. It was said that this land of milk and honey was to be found in the eastern Himalaya and that to reach it you had to pass behind an enormous hidden waterfall. For hundreds of years outsiders knew that the Tsang Po river left Tibet and entered a huge, and utterly impenetrable, gorge before emerging from the Himalaya around Tuting, but what happened to the river inside that gorge was unknown until the 1950s. As it turned out the river did indeed tumble over an enormous movie times winter park village waterfall and, what s more, it passed through a rich and fertile valley populated by Memba Buddhists, completely isolated from the rest of the world. Today, this vast region of northern Arunachal Pradesh and parts of south eastern Tibet remains movie times winter park village almost utterly unknown to the outside world, but Pemako is out there and for those willing to endure days of incredibly tough hiking (and deal with reams of paperwork) it is possible to visit.