Naga Hills · Northeast Hill Massif
Terraced graves on Garrison Hill, on the ground where the Japanese advance into India was halted between April and June 1944 — part of the fighting ran across the tennis court of the Deputy Commissioner's bungalow, and the court's outline is marked in the cemetery. The memorial carries the Kohima epitaph: "When you go home, tell them of us and say, for your tomorrow, we gave our today."
Best time: October–April.
An Angami village of terraced rice fields on a defensible spur, with a fort gate, three khels and more than twenty named rice varieties on its terraces. In 1998 the village council banned hunting and logging across its land and set up the Khonoma Nature Conservation and Tragopan Sanctuary — a conservation decision taken by a village, not by a state.
Best time: October–April. Getting there: 20 km west of Kohima by road.
A high bowl at about 2,450 m carpeted in dwarf bamboo that is cropped short by frost and grazing, so the valley reads as lawn. Its lily flowers in June and July. Access is on foot from Viswema or Jakhama, and the valley is also claimed and cared for from the Manipur side.
Best time: June–September for the lily; October–November for clear weather.
At 3,048 m the second-highest point in Nagaland, with a rhododendron on its slopes recorded in the 1990s as the tallest of its kind. The climb is done overnight from Kigwema to reach the summit at dawn.
Best time: November–March.
The Ao town and, three kilometres from it, Ungma — the largest and by tradition the oldest Ao village, from which many others were founded. Ao village government runs on a rotating council of clan elders, which is why the town has an unusually dense civic life.
The Konyak country: Angh houses with carved posts and hanging log drums, brass ornament, and the last generation of facially tattooed men, whose marks record a practice that ended in the middle of the twentieth century.
Best time: October–April.
A large Konyak village sitting directly on the international boundary — the line runs through the Angh's house, and his authority extends over villages on both sides of it. The village is the clearest single illustration that this cultural region is older than the border drawn across it.
Getting there: About 42 km from Mon town by hill road.
The Tangkhul peak on whose upper slopes the Shirui lily grows and nowhere else in the wild. It flowers in late May and June and has never been successfully naturalised elsewhere, which is why the village runs an annual festival around it.
Best time: May–June.
The highest point in the region at 3,841 m, standing on the frontier watershed itself. The approach is from Thanamir village, and the climb needs permits and local guides.
Best time: October–March.
The autumn roost of the Amur falcon, which crosses from Siberia to southern Africa and stops here in enormous numbers. In 2012 tens of thousands were being netted; the village councils of Pangti and its neighbours banned the hunting outright, and the roost is now guarded by the same people who once trapped it.
Best time: October–November.
Rows of carved monoliths in the foothill plain, left by the Dimasa Kachari kingdom before the sixteenth century. They belong to a plains-edge state, not to the hill villages, and mark the point where the two worlds met and traded.
A purpose-built site 12 km from Kohima where each recognised community maintains a morung and house in its own architectural style. It is a constructed display, built in 2000 for the Hornbill Festival, and it is the easiest place to see the region's architectural differences side by side.
A weaving and wood-carving cluster on the foothill edge near Dimapur, organised as a working craft village rather than a showroom.
A community-owned tourist village built in traditional Angami style and run by the village itself, with the revenue going to the village rather than to an operator.
Places worth visiting in Naga Hills — heritage sites, wildlife, pilgrimage and landscape, with the best time to go. (14)