We've been traveling every day for four days to get to Aizawl from Calgary. Everybody is jetlagged and hungry. Half our group is missing—we haven't seen them since we left the airport to drive to Aizawl, and those of us waiting at the Aizawl Ritz are worrying about what happens next. The Ritz is one of the nicest hotels in town, but if you saw Aizawl you'd know why saying that, this hotel is ragged, cold, and smells suspicious. The city is unbelievable. It's in India, but everyone on the street looks east Asian. They're Mizo and Chin people. Westerners don't come here. It's not easy to get here by any means, and we have to register with the police. I don't know what most Westerners would do here even if they did know the place exists, which we don't.
The entire city is built on top of a group of green-topped mountains. The buildings that can't fit on the very top trickle down the sides. No road lies on a flat plane, or even in a straight line for more than a block, every alley way is a staircase. How long it must take to learn your way around. Why build on top, and not in the valley like every other mountain town?
It's cool and the air is clear here, cool tropical bamboo forests as far as I can see. People dress like east Asians—well and in western clothes. The water (for the Ritz anyway) is trucked up the mountain every day.
Tomorrow we set out for an eight-hour drive to Champai, a town about an hour from the Burma border. It's an eight-hour drive because the roads wind around the mountains so severely. If we had a helicopter it would take two hours to get to Champai, so let's brace ourselves.
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