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shillong package covering hotel with breakfast,transfer,sightseeing will cost rs15700 per person on twin sharing basisDay 1 - Arrival - Guwahati to ShillongArrive at the Guwahati Airport and head straight to Shillong (140 km / 4-hour drive approx.). En route, behold the beauty of Umiam Lake, which is the biggest artificial lake in Meghalaya, located amidst the Sylvan Hills. Check in at the hotel and refresh yourself. If time permits, visit Cathedral of Marry and Ward's Lake. Spend the evening at leisure and you can explore the surroundings on your own. You can take a walk to the famous Police Bazar for shopping. Stay overnight in Shillong.Day 2 - Shillong - Cherrapunji - ShillongAfter savouring a delectable breakfast, drive to Cherrapunji. En route, visit the famous Elephant Falls. Once you reach Sohra, halt at the Duwan Sing Syiem View Point and witness the spellbinding view of the hills. In Cherrapunji, visit the stunning Seven Sisters Falls and Nohkalikai Falls. Later, take a cave walk inside the Mawsmai Cave. After lunch at Cherrapunji, visit Arwah Lumshynna Cave, a hidden wonder with stalagmites formations and numerous fossils on the rock walls. Then, you can return to Shillong for an overnight stay.Day 3 - Shillong - Mawlynnong - ShillongAfter breakfast, drive to Mawlynnong, the cleanest village in Asia (100 km / 3-hour drive approx.). With over 80 households, the village gives the ambiance of walking in a well-maintained park. Climb the 80 ft. Sky Walk at Mawlynnong village for the bird's eye view of the village, the plantations and faraway plains of Bangladesh. Explore the Khasi lifestyle, their culture and economy. Later, you can trek to the nearby Rewai Village. Walk down around 100 steps to witness the nature's wonder, living-root bridge. The bridges are tangles of massive thick roots, which the local people inter-twine to form a bridge that can hold several people at a time. Then, drive to Dawki, a village of the Jaintia community whose prime occupation is fishing. Be mesmerized by the beauty of the Umngot River, the venue of the annual boat race held during March- April in the Umsyiem village. Enjoy an amazing country boat river ride as you drive up to the Bangladesh border. Later, proceed to Shillong for an overnight stay. Note: It is advisable to carry packed lunch to Mwallynong.Day 4 - DepartureYour trip comes to an end on this day. After enjoying a delectable breakfast, head straight to Guwahati Airport for your journey back hom

Detailed Day Wise Itinerary(source:www.travelamass.com)Day 1 - Arrival - Guwahati to ShillongArrive at the Guwahati Airport and head straight to Shillong (140 km / 4-hour drive approx.). En route, behold the beauty of Umiam Lake, which is the biggest artificial lake in Meghalaya, located amidst the Sylvan Hills. Check in at the hotel and refresh yourself. If time permits, visit Cathedral of Marry and Ward's Lake. Spend the evening at leisure and you can explore the surroundings on your own. You can take a walk to the famous Police Bazar for shopping. Stay overnight in Shillong.Day 2 - Shillong - Cherrapunji - ShillongAfter savouring a delectable breakfast, drive to Cherrapunji. En route, visit the famous Elephant Falls. Once you reach Sohra, halt at the Duwan Sing Syiem View Point and witness the spellbinding view of the hills. In Cherrapunji, visit the stunning Seven Sisters Falls and Nohkalikai Falls. Later, take a cave walk inside the Mawsmai Cave. After lunch at Cherrapunji, visit Arwah Lumshynna Cave, a hidden wonder with stalagmites formations and numerous fossils on the rock walls. Then, you can return to Shillong for an overnight stay.Day 3 - Shillong - Mawlynnong - ShillongAfter breakfast, drive to Mawlynnong, the cleanest village in Asia (100 km / 3-hour drive approx.). With over 80 households, the village gives the ambiance of walking in a well-maintained park. Climb the 80 ft. Sky Walk at Mawlynnong village for the bird's eye view of the village, the plantations and faraway plains of Bangladesh. Explore the Khasi lifestyle, their culture and economy. Later, you can trek to the nearby Rewai Village. Walk down around 100 steps to witness the nature's wonder, living-root bridge. The bridges are tangles of massive thick roots, which the local people inter-twine to form a bridge that can hold several people at a time. Then, drive to Dawki, a village of the Jaintia community whose prime occupation is fishing. Be mesmerized by the beauty of the Umngot River, the venue of the annual boat race held during March- April in the Umsyiem village. Enjoy an amazing country boat river ride as you drive up to the Bangladesh border. Later, proceed to Shillong for an overnight stay. Note: It is advisable to carry packed lunch to Mwallynong.Day 4 - DepartureYour trip comes to an end on this day. After enjoying a delectable breakfast, head straight to Guwahati Airport for yo

I’m an American and I’ve lived in Russia for almost half of my life.Everything depends on what your definition of ‘quality of life’ is. Many assume that the US sets the standard for personal freedom, opportunities and material wealth. It just isn’t so. I’ve no regrets about my life in the US, but I came here to live in Russia for reasons that many Americans might understand because quality of life is not always about how comfortable you are.I first came to Russia in the 1990’s and spent a year here in Moscow and in regions to the south. I grew up in the shadow of the Cold War and I always wanted to know what was going on in Russia. I told myself that I didn’t believe all the propaganda, but with hindsight, I realized I believed quite a bit of it and I wanted to see how Russians would react to the changes in their society, how they would embrace freedom. What I got was a totally different picture. I found that Russians were not some kind of deprived, abused children who had been kept in the dark and were finally being released from their confinement to go outside and play and have normal, American dreams. Instead, I discovered hugely resilient people who lived simply without complaint. There there wasn’t a lot of material wealth, but the people were intellectually and emotionally vibrant and open. I realized my expectations had been colored almost completely by propaganda and plain lack of information.I was and remain fascinated by the Russian collective identity. Americans of my generation are grass fed on individualism and personal initiative. Russians didn’t seem to have anything, but they could get almost anything through connections. And these connections were far, wide and deep. It was easy to make friends and those friends introduced you to others and pretty soon you were sleeping on the couch of someone’s aunt in another city because some other guy thought it would be interesting for you to see his friend who lived there and had offered to take you fishing or mushroom hunting or whatever. Everybody treats you like family - including taking your ear off and feeding you and asking if you could get some other rich Americans to buy them a car and giving you the last bit of their very best samogon after a session in a banya made out of an old chicken coop.At first, I thought this was because I was a novelty. In the 1990’s, I was the first American many Russians had ever met. Later, when I met my future father-in-law, a history teacher and former small time Communist Party apparatchik from a small time Siberian town, I realized that it was very much a novelty, but of a kind far more profound than just making a new acquaintance. Meeting me was, for many Russians, like meeting the future as a person. My father-in-law kept saying, “ten years!” to himself periodically. He was referring to, of course, the Soviet counter-Revolutionary penal code. A ten year prison sentence for meeting a foreigner. Another ten years for your daughter marrying one. Another ten years for this or that conversation. And so on. Of course, there was no Soviet Union anymore when we met, and he and I became fast friends (another ten years!) but these former restrictions served as a kind of backdrop to our miraculous relationship that neither one of us could have ever imagined only a few years prior to our meeting. It was perhaps like two men, one who had spent years in a prison cell, who, now that they were able to meet each other in person, were unable to tell which one of them had been ‘the prisoner’ and which one had been ‘free.’ The joy of finally meeting that person and dispelling all the misconceptions is liberating, confusing, enlightening and utterly untranslatable.Over time, the novelty of being an American in Russia has worn off. A whole generation of young Russians have grown up, received an education, traveled and established themselves since the fall of the Soviet Union and many of them have become professionals in ordinary Western style careers like banking, consulting and sales. These are my clients who I meet daily and who do not see me as some special ‘first white man in Africa’ person like my father-in-law did. A lingering Soviet mentality continues to color their thinking, it is true, but no one imagines prison terms for making my acquaintance or having to explain a collective farm or how much I need to bribe a policeman for various awkward situations. These are creative, resourceful, intelligent, well traveled and professional people, yet they have the same down to earth quality as the Russians I met when I first arrived. They are ready to introduce me to their aunt who lives in some far flung region so I can go there are see the beauty of nature or the churches or to enjoy the summer season by the lake or the winter season on skis. At the same time, they are cosmopolitan like no Americans I know. They’ve been to Patagonia on a mountaineering trip, wine tasting in the south of France or to New York on an internship. They love their iPhones but are aware that social media is sewage for the mind. Unlike their predecessors, they can drive but they they prefer using Uber. They have worldly knowledge of food, music and other pop culture things, but they’ll drop everything to go home for a meal made by their grandmother.They’re self-conscious that they will still appear as bumpkins when traveling abroad, but it doesn’t stop them. They’re so deeply interested in the world beyond themselves, so much more than Americans of my generation who are often more concerned about seeing themselves in other things and people. The Russians want to know how stuff works and the opportunities the world holds. They’re adamantly convinced that Russia is backwards and still somehow catching up to the West, yet they often know far more about how the world works than the people they meet abroad. Their incurable fear that they’re not as cool as other nations drives Russians to relentless self improvement and education coupled with a a bizarre kind of world-weary humility. To my mind, it is not backwards at all, but a kind of triumph over some horrific form of collective PTSD. Wounded, cautious, but not without daring insight or humor, the Russians display quintessentially human recoil to the shit sandwich that is life - neither presumptuous or overconfident, but expressive, curious and reasonably secure in their inner purpose. The Russians simply don’t see themselves as the center of the universe like Americans do. Its quite refreshing.Some, mostly Russians, will say that I am speaking only of Moscow. There is some truth to this. The Putin era has been good for Russia in general, but that good has not been spread evenly across the nation. Some are bitter, but for many, it is much like it was before except the politicians no longer think its important to come to town to fix stuff. Left to fend for themselves, Russians outside major cities live in another time and speak to the future with cellphones, but less enthusiastically. The pull of the cities is strong for education, jobs and infrastructure that works, but as time goes forward, those who could have left the village have already left. Russia is dotted liberally with swaths of ghost towns where the pipes of the Federal budget simply do not reach. It is a tragedy on scale that Nassim Taleb, the author of The Black Swan, would appreciate.The grizzly inhabitants of the villages and far flung regions are like time travelers - the further away from Moscow, the further back in time towards the collapse of the Soviet Union - and in some cases / places, even before that. It has been 30 years but time for these people moves much slower. Some are like my father-in-law, eager to see what the future holds,. Others are too drunk to have a conversation. Some, mostly younger, are somewhere between angry and curious. They’re still at the crossroads between a life of hope for some unknown solution to their poverty and resolved acceptance of depression. Their mood can be said to be representative of the national mindset to some degree. These will talk, alternatively embarrassed and brash, about their grotesque life of tragic, passionate bonding with their peers, primitive attempts at copulation and their mistrust of people from the future and Muscovites (for all practical purposes the same people). They might be baptized or have a mother who was healed by a miracle of St. Seraphim of Sarov, but they don’t go to church, mostly because its closed since someone got drunk and burned it down. Their anger festers, directed neither at themselves or at the world at large. Their hopelessness may have economic roots, but it is more akin to some kind of eternal fatalism than frustration with the government. The city is worse, they’re convinced, because everybody there is a robot clone. It usually doesn’t represent what they hope to escape.Some from the regions work hard to get almost nothing but they have vision and patience. They are rustic, but less naive than they might appear. They are often amazing repositories of history or wise characters from a Dostoevsky novel. I am no longer the first white man in Africa for them, but a dandy who has an easy life because I live in the big city. They will not automatically hate me for this, but it is a kind of buffer than might take some time to overcome. They can fix tractors and other mechanical things because they have to - a vestige from a time when everybody in Russia was like this. They drink milk from a pail but they might also speak fluent German or be a surgeon who got tired of the BS working at the regional hospital. They will sell me their hand picked an preserved mushrooms and home grown potatoes, cabbage and squash on the side of the road for cash and we will have a commercial exchange that is almost American: they’re friendly because its practical, but they don’t really care who I am so long as I’m buying.As has been noted on this thread and elsewhere, the blank, shaggy canvas of rural Russia has not gone unnoticed by some foreigners, Americans included. If a foreigner stays in a village for any length of time, I have noticed, they have a general propensity to return to the earth, gradually sinking into the mood and habits of the village like a stalled truck that eventually sheds its paint, vital parts and upholstery and spouts sickly vegetation to blend into the landscape, becoming a naturalized citizen of the broken terrain. There are many plucky characters, however, who have seen this desolation as an opportunity - cheap land, isolation, a different mentality than the highly materialistic, politicized mindset of the US or Europe. Its a place where hard work might be appreciated or resented by the locals. Not that strange or foreign compared to the US, actually, but just on a smaller scale. The agriculturally minded Americans seem to do better than those hell bent on improving education or quality of life. One American I know has spent almost 15 years trying to create a vocational and legal shelter for Russian orphans who get unceremoniously turned out of the system when they reach 18. She tries to help orphans weening themselves from the tit of the state to go to university or technical schools, not to squander their state grant, etc. A few have made it, but as to be expected, the village where she works is completely indifferent. They see it as a lost cause. Every year groups of foreign students come, clean up the place, put on a show and feed everyone burgers to make nice and when they leave, locals continue to toss their garbage into the streets and public spaces as before. As a foreigner, I don’t get to judge this despair. Its a cross cultural mismatch, to be sure, but its clear that its more than a problem of endemic poverty, alcohol, or the failure of the state. I don’t know. All I know is that it looks and feels medieval in a dangerously unsanitary way. I avoid going there. Our friend, she stays. She thinks something will happen, eventually. God bless her faith. I hope the locals don’t kill her.If I do venture out, its usually to Optina Monastery where I have my own history, friends and acquaintances. The Orthodox are a minority in Russia, but the resurgence of Orthodox Christianity is a semblance of order that even many non-believers feel is a good sign, or at least benign. The Orthodox identity appears pronounced to outsiders primarily because it was the most abused and persecuted under Communism and yet retained the most self aware aspect of Russian culture.For most Russians, post Communist goals for the nation were and remain vague. Things changed, a lot for the better and the material instincts that kept the Soviet Union alive adapted quickly to the new circumstances. The Orthodox, however, had a much clearer vision of the world before, during and after Communism. The rebuilding of Churches, the re-establishment of seminaries and monasteries, the open practice of the Orthodox way of life - this is not an ideology so much as a way of life that is a reason unto itself. Life under Communism was hard and the state had a dubious relationship with the faithful. Things flared up into open persecution that filled the GULAGs like creaky wood stoves with so much human kindling and then times would calm down to permit housewives to leave their disaffected atheist husbands at home go to Church on feast days. Every single church building in Russia has a history of when it was destroyed and when its clergy were either shot or imprisoned. Today, churches are full and new churches are being built rapidly.The fresh days of spiritual revival in the 1990’s when the old ladies who walked 10 kilometres to church to sing at the liturgy because the new young priest didn’t know how are gone now. That priest, however, is now old and his church is full. If he was at all keen on learning from the experience of that old lady, he’s now passing on to the next generation what he learned - not from his seminary education, but from that old woman who survived the Communist era. He will remember her telling him about the imprisonment of her husband the deacon and how they shot her son. He will remember her telling him about the loss of her family farm and the suspicion of her neighbors who might have seen her light a candle before a secret icon in the middle of the night. He will remember her worn face and limbs that looked like a neglected park bench. She survived all this with her faith intact and he will remember every day that her dying wish was to give him, the new priest who wasn’t even born when most of her life was already over, the tattered Slavonik trebnik (требник) that her husband used before he was taken away in the night by the NKVD driving in a black raven sedan (ГАЗ М-1«Эмка»). Not all of the current generation of believers in Russia are inspired and haunted in this way, but more than a few are. The grandmothers were not always successful in passing on their faith to their children or grandchildren, but a critical mass of transmission has taken place such that we can say, even now, that the Russian Church is the Church of the Martyrs. The blood has long dried and been painted over, but one only has to remove the tiles in the floor or dig up the ground in the back lot to find the bones of those who died for the crime of being faithful to Christ.I was already Orthodox when I came to Russia and for me, it was like moving to the Old Testament or something. Fr. Seraphim Rose, an American Orthodox monk and writer who is perhaps more popular in Russia than in the US, once asked a young American man who was intending to travel to Russia in the early 1980s, before collapse, why he wanted to visit the Soviet Union. The young man replied that ‘the Russians knew how to suffer’. To some this sounds masochistic, but in fact the Russians are simply far better than the Americans (or almost any nation) at dealing with adverse circumstances, if only because they have had so much more practice. Some say it is a genetic Russian thing and this might be true, but as Western consumer culture takes deeper and deeper roots in Russia, this is being challenged, to say the least. Still, the Orthodox mindset is something that gives me a perspective - and access - to recesses and crevasses of Russian life that most foreigners never get to see or don’t see, even if it is standing there in broad daylight. I have relatives who are Old Believers, godparents who are monastics and I am interested in the history and literature that provides a roadmap to Russia across multiple dimensions. I feel extremely lucky to have witnessed all I have seen and to have become friends with people who have stories from the otherworld.As should be obvious, Russia is not a single place. It is many places and even many different periods in time with many different people, varieties of experience and qualities of life. Some Americans, like me, stick to the city because this is where the opportunities that they are able to take advantage of are to be found. Others go to the village to farm or reform and they have their reward. I don’t travel as much as I used to, but I have seen many of the obligatory and even more of the less traveled sites in Russia. I’ve traveled days on end by train, by bus and rickety aircraft. I’ve gotten rides from complete strangers and I’m working my way down an increasingly long list of places I want to go on pilgrimage to. I’m not dead yet, so there is a chance I may yet see the places I have seen in my dreams.Many have asked if I have become ‘Russified’ and, as far as I know or can tell, I have not. I am, if anything, increasingly American in my outlook. I’ve got a Russian wife and kids. Our world is filled with city noises, schedules and the urban warfare of remodeling the apartment, hassle with utilities. We don’t eat borscht every night. My kids love my homemade Mac and Cheese and Caesar Salad. Our Russian friends who don’t speak English are our friends just because they’re our friends and it has nothing to do with me being a foreigner. We are friends with other Russian-American and Russian-foreigner couples because its a thing that brings us together and helps us relate. I’ve got clients who have become friends over time, neighbors who share the produce from their dachas. We are pissed off when the city turns off the hot water, but we boil water on the stove just like anybody else. Traffic is outrageous and we don’t even have a car. We take advantage of the multi-child family benefits that the state offers and sometimes its a real relief and other times its just symbolic. We hate the quarantine and the masks, but we stay home and wear the masks, complaining under our breath. We get distracted by milestone events in our family and in the families of our friends, we are depressed an anxious about inflation. We go to church on Sundays and Feast days, praying for the health and welfare of our loves ones and for those who have passed away. We have icons in our home, as well as an internet connection and a microwave oven. Its much of the same stuff one might experience in the US, except its all in Russian and the Russian attitude surrounding us is at once more cheerful about small, personal things and perhaps more dour and cynical about larger issues.I suppose if one were to constantly compare how things are in Russia with the US, one could get pretty distracted. I haven’t lived in the US for so long, my only real connection to the states is my memory. I haven’t been back to the states in years, mostly because I can’t afford it, but if I had the money, I’d probably go to Abkhazia or Georgia. Should I, as an American, be expected to travel regularly to the US? Is that a quality of life thing? I don’t know. Information about my mother country comes to me via the Internet, Youtube and friends. I don’t follow the news because its all intensely twisted one way or another. I find I have quite enough on my plate as it is without hemming and hawing about what’s going on in the US. Friends in the US say that its terrible or that its not as bad as the news says it is. My suspicion is that they’re both probably right. I live here. I don’t convert from Imperial units to the metric system. I just use the metric system because that’s what’s here. Converting stuff don’t make much sense to me anymore.My father in-law visits on occasion and its always a hoot. He’s had a few mild heart attacks and he’s not the vigorous gardener he once was. When he sees me, he likes to talk about obscure things, like the award that the Soviets gave General Eisenhower on June 10, 1945 - the Order of Victory. My father-in-law says Eisenhower was the only American ever to receive this prestigious Soviet Award. Once the recipient of the Order of Victory dies, the medal is supposed to be returned to Russia. Ike died and somehow they’ve never gotten around to giving the medal back, however. If you’re American and you want to see it, its on display at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum in Abilene, Kansas. My father-in-law knows this not because he’s looked it up online, but because he remembers it from the Soviet newsreels and faded yellow books that are now out of print. Its either a little cross-cultural misunderstanding or the Americans, because of the collapse of the Soviet Union, thought they didn’t have to give it back. The war is long over and nobody (except my father-in-law) remembers Ike or the medal. In a way, its kind of like the state of Russian-American relations now - nobody remembers the past, how it used to be. Its like the Cold War either never existed or never ended. No one can remember or seems to want to bother remembering. There are grievances, but nobody knows what its all really about because Russia is a new country but Americans can’t seem to make any distinction from the old country. Americans imagine Russia is a hellhole of a place, utterly unsuitable for Americans and their rights and entitlements. At the same time, they are unaware of the shifting sands under their own feet. Russia has literally become everything Cold War America wanted it to become, but because we’ve forgotten about what we wanted, the line has moved and now new considerations take precedence. Besides, Russia is still very handy as a boogeyman. It all fits together very nicely as long as you don’t think about it too much.In the meantime, Russians sit back and silently watch the slow motion replay of their own Revolution unfolding in America. They watch it on their iPhone because their apartment is too small for a TV and an iPhone is more useful than a new couch, which they also need, but that will come later. Right now, there is an American guy sleeping on that couch. When he wakes up, the Russian guy will show him the latest video clip of about Trump and the American will laugh and they will both wonder what’s going to happen next in the US while they have coffee. Later, in the car, they will forget about Trump and wonder if the quarantine has affected the local farmers selling potatoes and apples and melons on the side of the road as they drive back to Moscow. They’ve got hand sanitizer and cheap Chinese masks in the glove compartment, but they will forget to use them when they get to the first big mega mall on the outskirts of Moscow. Nobody will hassle them.They will go into the store and the American guy will look for a cheap-o Chinese made immersion blender. He’s gonna make Gazpacho later in the week. The Russian guy buys a hunk of pork. He’s gonna make shashlyk when he gets back to Moscow. They both look at the Black Angus steak and drool a bit. Not today. It’s a little too expensive. Besides, the kids like chicken wings better. The wings are cheaper, anyway, so what’s not to like?