Introducing India ( My Country)

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Mangalore

Situated at the point where the Netravati and Gurupur Rivers flow into the Arabian Sea, Managlore has been a pit stop on international trade routes since the 6th century AD. It was the major port of Hyder Ali’s kingdom, and today the region’s coffee and cashew crops are still shipped out from the modern port, which is 10km north of the city.

Not an especially picturesque place, Mangalore is the largest city on Karnataka’s coast, and therefore is a useful place to stop for amenities. It’s not without its tourist charms, however, chief of which is quiet Ullal Beach, 12km south of the city.

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Margao (Madgaon)

The capital of Salcete province, Margao (also known as Madgaon) is the main population centre of south Goa and is probably the busiest town in the state. If you’ve just arrived from the cities of ‘real’ India then the first thing that will strike you is how clean and tidy Margao is. Even though there is little to see or do here it’s worth stopping by to see how Goa lives beyond the beaches.

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Matheran

Matheran (Jungle Topped), resting atop the Sahyadris Mountains amid a shady forest crisscrossed with walking tracks and breathtaking lookouts, is easily the most gorgeous of Maharashtra’s hill stations.

Hugh Malet, collector for the Thane district, ‘discovered’ Matheran in 1850 while climbing the path known as Shivaji’s Ladder; thereafter it quickly became a popular hill station. The place owes its tranquillity to a ban on motor vehicles and bicycles, making it an ideal place to rest the ears and lungs. It’s a very friendly town, well geared up for Indian tourists, but less sure of foreigners.

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Mathura

Braj Bhoomi – the ‘Land of Eternal Love’ and the name given to the region where the popular god Krishna is believed to have been born and spent his early years – existed only in the collective consciousness of Hindus until it was rediscovered by 16th-century scholars in the physical world in and around Mathura, 58km northwest of Agra.

Mathura was once a Buddhist centre with 20 monasteries that housed 3000 monks, but during the 8th century Buddhism began to give way to Hinduism. In 1017 most of the Buddhist temples and Hindu shrines were levelled by the Afghan warlord Mahmud of Ghazni. More destruction occurred in the 16th century when Aurangzeb flattened the Kesava Deo Temple during one of his many demolition sprees and built a mosque in its place.

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Meghalaya

Carved out of Assam in 1972, hilly Meghalaya (The Abode of Clouds) is a cool, pine-fresh contrast to the sweaty Assam plains. Set on dramatic horseshoes of rocky cliff above the Bengal plains, Cherrapunjee and Mawsynram are statistically the wettest places on earth. Most of this precipitation falls April to September (and mostly at night), creating some very impressive waterfalls and carving out some of Asia’s longest caves.

Eastern and central Meghalaya are mainly populated by the closely related Jaintia, Pnar and Khasi peoples, originally migrants from Southeast Asia. Western Meghalaya is home to the unrelated Garo tribe. Despite their different ethnic backgrounds, these two groups both use a matrilineal system of inheritance, children taking the mother’s family name and babies often carried on the father’s back.

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Mizoram

Seen from the sky, Mizoram seems to have been ploughed by a forgetful god who left the deep north-south furrows with a green fuzz of bamboo. Mizoram is tidy and almost entirely Christian. You’ll see very few Indian faces amongst the local Thai-Chinese style features. People are surreally but uninvasively friendly. Don’t be surprised if you’re warmly thanked by total strangers for bothering to visit their state.

Mizoram runs entirely to its own rhythm. Most businesses are long shut by 6pm, and virtually everything closes tight on Sunday. Forget breakfast-lunch-dinner, Mizos trad*itionally have two main meals, zingchaw (morning meal, 9am to 10am) and tlaichaw (afternoon meal, 4pm to 6pm). Both feature rice, boiled leaves, boiled vegetables and boiled fatty smoked-pork alongside. Flavour is added using rawt, a salsa of diced chillies, ginger and onion. On paper Mizoram is a dry state but friendly, wobbling drunks are surprisingly common.

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Mt Abu

Mt Abu rises high above southern Rajasthan, cool on the heels of the baking desert plains. It’s a welcome hill station retreat, nestled along pedolo-filled Nakki Lake, which attracts hordes of weekenders from neighbouring Gujarat. The tremendous wooded valleys that line the winding drive to the summit lend some longed-for Alpine beauty to a Rajasthan excursion, and house wildlife including bears, wild boars, langoors (wild donkeys), Indian civets, hyenas and sambars. There are also plenty of botanical delights on offer, most notably a number of rare orchids, and excellent trekking opportunities for all levels of fitness.

Mt Abu is more widely known as a pilgrimage centre, particularly for Jains, and the clusters of once stately summer retreats – and damp brick hotels – are often filled with the seasonally devout. The extraordin*ary Jain Dilwara temples rival most in India though, and the humble presence of Brahma Kumaris followers gives Mt Abu its place in the eternal sun.

It’s organised mayhem around Diwali, and best avoided; May sees the Summer Festival , while December is the time of the Winter Festival . Note that evening temperatures can catch you cold, so remember to pack something warm.

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Mudumalai National Park

In the foothills of the Nilgiris, this 321-sq-km park (admission Rs 35), and the surrounding forest outside the park boundaries, are the best places for wildlife viewing in Tamil Nadu. Part of the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve (3000 sq km), the reserve’s vegetation ranges from grasslands to semi-evergreen forests that are home to chitals (spotted deer), gaurs (bisons), tigers, panthers, wild boars and sloth bears. Otters and crocodiles inhabit the Moyar River. The park’s wild elephant population numbers about 600.

A good time to visit Mudumalai is between December and June although the park may be closed during the dry season, February to March. Heavy rain is common in October and November.

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Mumbai

Measure out: one part Hollywood; six parts traffic; a bunch of rich power-moguls; stir in half a dozen colonial relics (use big ones); pour in six heaped cups of poverty; add a smattering of swish bars and restaurants (don’t skimp on quality here for best results); equal parts of mayhem and order; as many ancient bazaars as you have lying around; a handful of Hinduism; a dash of Islam; fold in your mixture with equal parts India; throw it all in a blender on high (adding generous helpings of pollution to taste) and presto: Mumbai.

An inebriating mix of all the above and more, this mass of humanity is a frantic melange of India’s extremes. It is the country’s financial powerhouse and its vogue centre of fashion, film and after-dark frolics. Glistening skyscrapers and malls mushroom amid slums and grinding poverty, and Mumbai slowly marches towards a brave new (air-conditioned) world. But not everyone made the guest list: more than half of the population lives in slums, and religious-based social unrest tugs at the skirt of Mumbai’s financial excess.

Only once the initial shell shock of Mumbai’s chaos subsides, can one start to appreciate the city’s allure: a wealth of Art Deco and grand colonial relics; cacophonic temples; warrens of bazaars; and the odd spiritual bastion of tranquillity. In Mumbai you can dine at some of the finest restaurants in the country, and work off the appetite gyrating at ultrachic bars alongside Bollywood starlets and wannabes. With a pinch of gumption, a dash of adventure, an open wallet and a running start, there’s no excuse not to dive into the Mumbai madness head-first.

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Munnar

With a Sound-of-Music-in-India backdrop of rolling mountain scenery, craggy peaks, manicured tea estates and crisp mountain air, Munnar really hits the spot after the sticky heat of the lowlands. Once known as the High Range of Travancore, today Munnar is the commercial centre of some of the world’s highest tea-growing estates. But don’t be fooled by the noisy and grubby namesake town of the region; the real attractions lie in the surrounding hills.

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Murud

About 165km south of Mumbai, the sleepy fishing town of Murud is the most obvious first port of call. With a striking beach (though suffering from a little pollution carried down from Mumbai) and the commanding island fortress of Janjira, 5km south of the village, you’ll be happy you came.

Standing a little way offshore, the fortress was built in 1140 by Siddi Jahor and became the 16th-century capital of the Siddis of Janjira, descendants of sailor-traders from the Horn of Africa. Although constructed on an island, its 12m-high walls seem to emerge straight from the sea. This made the fort utterly impreg*nable, even to the mighty Marathas – Shivaji tried to conquer it by sea and his son, Sambhaji, attempted to tunnel to it. Today the fort has finally been conquered by none other than Mother Nature: its walls are slowly turning to rubble and its interior back into forest.

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Mussoorie

Perched on a ridge 2km high, the ‘Queen of Hill Stations’ spends much of the year swathed in clouds. When the mist clears, views of the green Doon Valley and the distant white-capped Himalayan peaks are superb, and in the hot months the cooler temperatures and fresh mountain air make a welcome break from the plains below. It certainly gets cold up here in winter, with snowfall common in January. Although Mussoorie’s main bazaars can at first seem like a tacky holiday camp for families and honeymooners, there are plenty of walks in the area, interesting Raj-era buildings, and an upbeat atmosphere.

Established by the British in 1823, Mussoorie became hugely popular with the Raj set. The ghosts of that era linger on in the architecture of the churches, libraries, hotels and summer palaces. The town is swamped with visitors between May and July, but at other times many of the 300 hotels have vacancies and their prices drop dramatically.

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Mysore

It’s not difficult to divine Mysore’s charismatic appeal. The historic seat of the Wodeyar maharajas is easy to get around, has a good climate and works hard to promotes its regal heritage. Famous for its traditional painting and its silk, sandalwood and incense production, Mysore is now promoting itself as an international centre for Ashtanga yoga. Whether you choose to stretch your body in a traditional yoga pose or take more gentle exercise strolling through the city’s magnificent palace and colourful market, Mysore is one Indian city that rewards a slower pace.

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Nagaland

The Naga peoples originated in Southeast Asia and are distributed all along the India/Myanmar border. However, in Nagaland they form a majority everywhere except Dimapur. For centuries some 20 headhunting Naga tribes valiantly fought off any intruders. In between they kept busy by fighting each other and developing mutually unintelligible languages. Today inter-tribe communication uses a ‘neutral’ lingua franca called Nagamese (a sort of market Assamese). Major Naga groups include the developed Angami and Rengma of Kohima district, the Lotha of Wokha district (locally famed for their cooking) and the Konyak of Mon district, whose villages have the most striking traditional architecture. For festivals, Naga women wear a hand-woven shawl that’s distinctive for each subtribe, while the men dust off their old warrior wear, loin cloth and all.

It’s festival Nagaland that most tourists imagine when booking a Nagaland tour. And Kohima’s December Hornbill Festival easily justifies the trip. At other times (except perhaps in rural Mon district), some visitors find the contrasting lack of spectacle to be a disappointment. But if you lower your expectations from those National Geographic images, there’s still lots of interest in meeting a people whose culture, in the words of one Indian journalist, has been through ‘1000 years in a lifetime’.

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Nagarhole National Park

West of the Kabini River is the 643-sq-km wildlife sanctuary of Nagarhole National Park (Rajiv Gandhi National Park; Indian/foreigner Rs 50/150, camera Rs 50), pronounced nag-ar-hole-eh. The lush forests here are home to around 60 tigers, as well as leopards, elephants, gaurs, muntjacs (barking deer), wild dogs, bonnet macaques and common langurs; animal sightings are more common here than in Bandipur.

The park’s main entrance is 93km southwest of Mysore. However, the best accommodation and the most beautiful views are at the Kabini Lake side of the reserve, near the village of Karapura, around 80km south of Mysore. Orange County (Orange County Home Page) are building a resort on the far bank of the lake here. If heading to the park by taxi, make sure that your driver knows exactly which side of the park you’re staying, as it’s quite a distance between the two locations.

If you’re not staying at a lodge, the only way to see the park is on the bus tour (per person Rs 25; 6-8am & 4-5pm); the best time to view wildlife is the hot months (April to May), but the winter air (November to February) is kinder. Bookings can be made in advance with the Forest Department in Mysore, or you can just turn up.