Water-resistant trousers, two kinds of insect repellent (one for leeches, another for black flies), five identical gym tees in different colours, an oversized men’s Gore-Tex jacket and tiny ziplock bags of trail mix. Just one ‘going out’ top. Zero negligees. For a trek, this packing list would have been normal. For a honeymoon? I could almost hear everyone I knew tsk-tsk-ing.
I got married in March this year. But long before the wedding, people had started asking where we were going for our honeymoon—as though without a 7D-6N package to a universally acknowledged romantic destination, our marriage might not be considered legally binding.
“We have no idea,” we’d say to surprised well-wishers.
The truth was that between vendor calls, family negotiations and spending alarming amounts of time creating moodboards for the wedding, we had avoided planning the honeymoon entirely. But a week after the wedding, still coming down from the high of having gathered friends and family in one place to celebrate our union and attending dinners thrown in our honour, we wanted nothing more than to disappear from the city. People feverishly suggested spots like Italy and Costa Rica; we ignored them all. Being married gave us a new-found licence to do whatever we wanted.
I had long desired to see the one-horned rhinos of Assam. And now, I finally had both the time and a smitten man willing to accompany me there. The rest of the itinerary came together with remarkable fortuitousness. A woman trying on trekking shoes at Decathlon gave us her Meghalaya recommendations. Instagram led us to Arunachal Pradesh. A week later, we left for Northeast India.
We flew into Guwahati, crossed over to Bhutan for one night, then drove to Shillong, using it as a base to explore Meghalaya’s waterfalls, rivers and root bridges. A week later, we drove seven hours to Kaziranga National Park and saw enough rhinos to make a short documentary. In Arunachal Pradesh, we spent a week driving down winding roads with members of the Idu Mishmi tribe, going deeper and deeper into the Dibang Valley. A particularly brutal nine-hour drive took us to Anini, after which we continued towards the India-China border. Along the way, there was rafting, trekking, tribal homestays, cooking workshops and waterfalls along the Eastern Himalayas. Over 25 days, we packed and unpacked eleven times.
When we told the owner of our homestay in Anini that we were there on our honeymoon, he burst out laughing. Apparently, we were the first couple to wander that far in search of wedded bliss. It didn’t help that I kept referring to it as ‘the trip’, only to be corrected—repeatedly—that this was, in fact, ‘The Honeymoon’.
Just like her big sister, ‘The Wedding’, honeymoons have an official script: private dinners, uninterrupted sex, massages and outdoor showers—a blueprint The White Lotus has made a fortune out of satirising. A combination of last-minute planning and a hankering for adventure had instead possessed me and my husband to book six homestays, one campsite and a tribal home where we slept on mats, separated from our hosts by a thin wall of bamboo.
For much of the trip, we weren’t even alone. Meals at our Kaziranga farm stay were served at a communal table with the host family and every other guest on the property. In Arunachal Pradesh, the guide duo we travelled with spent entire drives fighting over the music while my husband and I whispered in the back seat like teenagers sneaking around. No one cared much that it was our honeymoon, and we liked that.
