Aizawl

Aizawl is stacked along a ridge at about 1,130 metres above the Tlawng valley, and the whole city is built on the slope, so front doors open at road level while kitchens hang three storeys down the hillside on stilts. It began as a British fort in 1890 during the Lushai expeditions and became a capital in 1972; today it is the centre of a state that is overwhelmingly Christian and second only to Kerala in literacy. That shapes the week.

On Sunday the shutters come down, taxis thin out and hymn-singing carries between hillsides from churches that fill twice over. Solomon's Temple at Chawlhhmun, a vast white church raised by the Kohhran Thianghlim over decades of volunteer labour, is the largest of them. Bara Bazar is the opposite: a crush of stalls where Mizo women sell wild fern, banana flower, smoked pork, river fish and packets of bamboo shoot, sitting behind their produce in puan wraps.

The Mizoram State Museum explains the clans, the mautam bamboo famine of 1959 and the insurgency that followed it, ended by the 1986 accord that made this one of India's calmest states. Half a day out, Reiek keeps a compound of traditional Mizo houses below a 1,465-metre peak with a view down to the plains of Bangladesh. Come in early March for Chapchar Kut and the Cheraw bamboo dance.