Onwards to Jorhat

Although I planned to get a fairly leisurely start to my day and travel to Jorhat, my internal time clock had other ideas. I had been waking at 5 and 6 in the morning and this morning was no different. I was also in a dorm room with 5 other people and some of those had early mornings as well. So I was up and awake at 7 and had nothing much to keep me in place. I decided I might as well get a move on, and headed over to the bus station at about 7:40. I got there and got a ticket on a bus that was leaving at 8. Great.

There was more evidence of the reverence for the holy cow on the trip to Jorhat. Cows were standing around unmolested in the middle of the street.

In Jorhat, the road passes by the city on a by-pass and the bus was actually headed to another city. So they stopped at the junction of the by-pass and the road into the town proper and dropped the people off who were heading to Jorhat. And of course I, being my usual prepared self, didn't have much clue to how far out of town I might be or indeed where I was in relation to anything. As I got off the bus, there was the usual collection of touts waiting for people to get off buses. I ignored them and headed across the street and down a bit to where there were a couple of hotels. It didn't seem to be the center of town, but I was unsure how big Jorhat actually was, so I could have been in the exact center of town and not known it. (As it turned out I was actually probably 3 or 4 kilometers from the town center, something I would find out when I walked downtown later.)

One of the hotels was called the Hotel Rhino. I considered that to be an auspicious signal, as I wanted to visit the nearby Kaziranga National Park in order to see rhinos, so I stopped in to see how expensive it might be. It came to about 9 dollars, and the room was quite nice, so I took it. The true selling point was when I felt the bed and it was an actual mattress (albeit a foam mattress), and I would be sleeping on a real bed for the first time in weeks. I was going to sleep well that night.

A little while later, I headed out to see some of the town, and to find the Assam Tourism tourist lodge and office. That's when I found out just how far out of town I actually was.

I didn't know where it was exactly, except that it was near the town's fire station. But this was a much bigger town than Tezpur had been and just wandering around wasn't enough to find the lodge. In the end, some friendly university students stopped me to have a chat and they were able to point me in the right direction. I found the tourism office and met a very nice man there as well. I left with tons of information and a packet of brochures and maps that would help me figure out what to do with myself for the next few days until Kaziranga National Park opened for tourism for the year. They really do treat visitors well to this state, and their tourist lodges are top notch in terms of facilities and information.

Then it was back to hotel for the evening. Along the way I stopped to get a haircut. It was amazing. The cut itself was just a normal cut, although he did it all by hand and with scissors instead of a shaver. But afterwards, the barber gave me a scalp massage that was amazing. I have never had such a treatment. And afterwards my neck, which has been bothering me for a few weeks, felt much better. This was all for the fantastic sum of about 80 cents. I love India!!