Northeast India; Day 1 - travelling

  Well my next adventure begins. Once again I found myself traveling with my friend Max from Germany, as well as his dad and schoolfriend. Our destination was northeast India, a classic birders destination, but usually in the spring and not so often in the autumn like we were doing. It gives us a chance to hopefully pick up on a few oddball species that others don’t get.

  That was all to look forward to however, as our first day (days really) only involved traveling. I awoke at 03:00 in Manchester at my friend Phil's house, before arriving at the airport at 03:30. My first flight went to Munich, where I then had a three-hour wait which should have been very peaceful, except that I did not know if the others, travelling to Munich from Frankfurt would a.) make their connection and b.) even be allowed on the plane since it was apparently overbooked. Fortunately neither of these worst case scenarios transpired, and our plane left Munich at 12:30.

  After six and a half hours in the air, we arrived in Delhi just after midnight local time. It was dark and smoggy, and we had to then wait four hours again to pick up an internal flight to the city of Guwahati in the Indian northeast. This flight was another two hours! Once we arrived we were met by our guides and drivers, and then we commenced a 10-hour drive to finally reach our first birding destination. All in all we finally got to our lodging Hotel Pemaling at 18:00 local time, absolutely shattered.

  Very little birding was done, and few birds were seen between naps. A short stop near a river picked out Little Forktail and Spotted Forktail which were both obviously fantastic to see, even if a little distant. And outside a restaurant that we ate at we had a group of 10 Black-chinned Yuhina, which were my first lifer of the trip. We also had our first mammals as well, with a group of Long-tailed Macaque on the side of the road.

  But with everything now in place, we have three weeks of hopefully excellent birding to get stuck into.