What did we do before the Internet? Honestly, I can barely remember. For popular travel spots, guidebooks were adequate. But more off the tourist track places it was hard to find information. Now there is so much information at our fingertips – literally!

So, if we go to Assam, how do we get there? Bangkok is our usual gateway to Asia. It has great connections to most Asian cities. And we love Bangkok, so we always plan to spend some time there. As I looked at flights, the logical routing was from Bangkok to Kolkata then to Guwahati. Air was going to be easy.

After reading about Assam, and figuring out transport, I wanted to see what kinds of accommodations I could find. Here’s where Google and Bing really shine. Now, both search engines turn up a lot of garbage as well as useful information. And often you have to be willing to go a few pages into the search results to find what you are looking for.

One of the websites I found was one I’d known about in its periodical form, back before the web is Sawdays. Now this is the kind of website that has done some pre-screening for you. While I always want to sort through the searches myself as well, in case they’ve left out some real gems, these kinds of websites can be very helpful. So I did a search on Sawdays for all of the properties in Assam and came up with an interesting assortment.

Next, I read everything I could on each of the properties that sounded interesting. That meant checking the Lonely Planet, searching the travel sites like Fodors and Thorntree, and even the dreaded Tripadvisor.

I am not a fan of TripAdvisor. Why not? First off, I find the incredible proliferation of advertising so distracting that all I want to do is get away from it. Second, they do silly things like naming the #1 rated hotel in each place (as well as all the other numbers). They have no system to sort the various accommodations. So you have 5-star resorts and the barest-bone hostels on the same list. It’s like rank ordering apples, oranges and rocks. Third, there are often rave reviews of places on the site before the hotel even opens. Now how do you think that happens? So I view all of what is written on that site with a critical eye. Sometimes I find some useful information. More often, I rummage through some posts and decide that there is nothing very useful there.

So, at this point, I have the following places that look like good options to me:
Thengal Manor and Diphlu River Lodge.

I’d love to do a short cruise on the Brahmaputra.

So I now have some puzzle pieces to put together. It looks possible to do, and the combination of Assam with a few days in Kolkata seems like a great combination.

So now I’ve done my research, it’s time to book – right? Well, no.

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