Bye, bye Guwahati!

On Sunday morning I was privileged to speak at Bread of Life Church. It was with a translator, and I found it hard to maintain the flow of the message. Sunday afternoon, we packed our bags for storage and for the trip to Kaziranga National Park and Wildlife Refuge. As soon as breakfast was over on Monday morning, we packed into the vehicle and headed toward Kaziranga. It is about 200 km, but the vagaries of travel in India turned that into a five-hour drive. It was four-lane for the first half, but still it was impossible to make good time. Thankfully, the driver knew of the lodge we had booked, as I failed to see any road signs pointing to it, and it was several back lane roads off the highway. The lodge appeared Olde English in style, and we estimated it had been built before the turn of the century, the 19th century! There was a great hall adorned with various animal and historical artifacts; that was enjoyable; we took our meals in that room. The rooms were of the era as well. Our room was on the ground floor, and we could see the ground between the floor boards. We were called at 5:30am for our game drive. We boarded elephants for the occasion; that was pretty special. The mahout sat on the neck with one barefoot on the top of each ear. Three of us rode behind him. We had a great time and managed to see several of the one-horned Assam rhinos. We also saw buffalo. After breakfast we stopped by a shop to view the goods produced on the handloom by an acquaintance of Ray's. I enjoyed watching the loom in action. After lunch we drove back to Guwahati. On Wednesday, we had our final set of classes with the schools in Guwahati. That seemed to go well, and there were many heart-tugging good-byes as we realized we would be leaving Guwahati the next morning. Now we're off to Imphal, where the prospects are for cooler weather as we gain elevation from 55m in Guwahati to 785m in Imphal.