There is a part of India where clouds live below you, where centuries-old bridges grow stronger every year, another where sixteen tribes celebrate in unison every December, and where the food has never needed to borrow flavour from anywhere else.
Meghalaya. Nagaland. Tripura.
Three states. Three completely distinct worlds. And together, one of the most compelling travel stories on the subcontinent.
I’ve had the pleasure of spending twenty years building hotels in this region. And I still can’t fully explain what it does to you.
Meghalaya: Where the Earth Builds Its Own Architecture
If you want to understand the Northeast, start with the land.
Meghalaya means “abode of clouds.” That’s not poetry. That’s a literal description of what happens when you stand in your room and watch clouds roll in below you. Cherrapunjee — Sohra, in its original name, is among the wettest places on earth. Not just in India. On earth. And yet the light here, when it breaks through after rain, is unlike anything you’ll find on a travel poster.
The fauna, the flora, the waterfalls — this place operates at a different register of natural beauty. The people have been building living root bridges for centuries — training the aerial roots of fig trees across rivers until they fuse, strengthen, and hold. No steel. No cement. The oldest ones are four hundred years old and still carrying weight.
Meghalaya loves its cars, and we Meghalaya people love our driving. So much so that while sitting at ML05 CAFÉ at Upper Shillong, we decided to drive our ML05 registered car from Shillong to London, across 27 countries. The café sits in Upper Shillong today because this city deserves a space that carries its spirit: curious, unhurried, completely its own. Grab a coffee there and watch the rain come down. You’ll understand immediately.
And when evening comes, the music scene in Shillong is just another level. If you get into Tring Tring — the bar at Polo Hotels Shillong — on a Friday, you will see that the musical talent is not just on the stage but literally on each table!
Nagaland: Sixteen Tribes, One Extraordinary Stage
Nagaland has sixteen officially recognised tribes. Each carries its own language, textile tradition, food culture, and music. Together, they stage the Hornbill Festival every December in Kisama — one of the most extraordinary cultural gatherings in Asia. Every tribe. Every tradition. Ten days.
You cannot do Hornbill anywhere else. You cannot replicate it. You can only show up.
The whole Northeast is serious about culture — and nowhere more so than Nagaland. Kohima sits at an altitude with the kind of views that make you recalibrate your sense of scale. The food market is a world unto itself. Smoked pork. Fermented bamboo shoots. Axone. Flavours that are bold, clean, and fabulously local.
We are opening Polo Hotel Kohima soon — on Araduhra Hill, Nagaland’s first five-star hill city resort. It’s on top of a hill, built like a resort, with rooms named after the landscape itself. The Dzükou Valley — one of the most pristine high-altitude landscapes in India — sits just beyond.
But the building is only part of it. Anyone can put a property in a beautiful location. What matters is what you do with it. Can you have a butler who knows the best trail to the valley at dawn? Can you arrange a meal cooked by a local family, not a hotel kitchen? Can you make a guest feel like they’ve genuinely been inside a place, not just adjacent to it? That’s what we’re building in Kohima.
Tripura: The Quiet Kingdom
Tripura is India’s third smallest state. It is also quietly one of its most layered.
The Ujjayanta Palace in Agartala — built by the Manikya dynasty at the turn of the twentieth century — is a magnificent white structure surrounded by manicured gardens. The Neermahal water palace rises out of Rudrasagar Lake like something from another century entirely. Tripura’s tribal craft traditions in bamboo, cane, and handloom are increasingly attracting serious design attention from across the country.
But nothing in Tripura stops me quite like Unakoti. The name translates to “one less than a crore.” And the legend behind it is one of the most amazing things I’ve ever heard. Two legends. The first one has it that the sage Kallu wanted to accompany Lord Shiva to Kashi. Lord Shiva agreed — on one condition. Kallu had to sculpt one crore images of Shiva overnight, and they would leave together at dawn. Kallu worked through the night. By morning, he had completed 99,99,999 images. One short. Lord Shiva, true to his word, left without him. The other legend is that Lord Shiva once spent a night here en route to Kashi. 99,99,999 gods and goddesses followed him and were to wake at sunrise to proceed to Kashi. Unfortunately, none awoke on time, except Lord Shiva himself. Before he set out for Kashi alone, he turned the others to stone and that is how the site got its name!
Those stone figures are still there.
Carved into a hillside in the middle of a forest in northern Tripura, Unakoti holds some of the largest rock-cut bas-relief sculptures in India, dating back to the 7th or 8th century. The centrepiece is a colossal head of Lord Shiva, over thirty feet high, emerging from the rock face, flanked by carvings that disappear into the treeline. There are no crowds. No noise. Just the jungle, the stone, and the weight of a story that’s been sitting here for over a thousand years.
The People
The Northeast, if you sit down and recount everything that sets it apart, is genuinely staggering. The geography alone. The climate. What the climate produces — in landscape, in food, in culture, in people.
Infrastructure is improving. Connectivity is growing. A new generation of travellers is actively seeking exactly what these three states have always quietly offered.
It’s a land of stories.
Come and find yours.
Written by: Deval Tibrewalla Founder & CEO Polo Hotels & Resorts
