Assam

Assam is the Brahmaputra. The river sets the shape of the state, the timing of the season and the reason the wildlife is here. Kaziranga, a World Heritage Site since 1985, holds the single largest population of one-horned rhino anywhere, and it shuts through the monsoon, roughly May to October, because it floods. A realistic first trip is Guwahati, then Kaziranga, then Majuli, the river island reached by ferry from Jorhat where the Vaishnavite satras still run as working monasteries. Three stops, a week, and that is enough. People try to add Manas on the Bhutan border, also a World Heritage Site and the only place holding wild pygmy hogs, and spend the extra days in a car. It deserves its own trip. Upper Assam is the part almost nobody sees: the tea districts around Dibrugarh, and Sivasagar, where the Ahom kings left brick temples and water tanks that get almost no visitors. November to April. The rains from June are serious, and flooding here is not a background detail.