Nagaland

Nagaland is not one culture but seventeen recognised tribes, each with its own language, and the distance between them is the reason to come. What looks on a map like one small state is several, and you will not see them all. Most trips start at Kohima. The war cemetery there holds the Commonwealth dead of the 1944 battle that halted the Japanese advance into India, and it is the most affecting half hour in the state. From Kohima you go two ways: south and up to Dzukou Valley, high rolling grassland on the Manipur border, climbed from Viswema; or north to Mon district for the Konyak, where at Longwa the chief's house sits astride the India-Myanmar line. The mistake is treating the Hornbill Festival as the trip. It runs 1 to 10 December at Kisama outside Kohima and it is genuinely good, but ten days of staged performance is not the same as sitting in a village, and Kohima fills completely. Either book months out or come either side of it. An Inner Line Permit is required for Indian citizens too. Nagaland is also officially dry. October to April. The rest is rain and slow roads.