Hot List The Best of Arunachal Pradesh

Tawang
Surrounded by scenic moun&shytain ranges, the high-altitude Tawang Valley is Arunachal Pradesh&rsquos most pop&shyular tourist destination. Visitors come to see the stunning icy mountain pass Se La, and the town&rsquos beautiful 16th century Buddhist monastery&mdashIndia&rsquos largest, and a holy site for Tibetan Buddhists. Tawang has been under de facto Indian adminis&shytration only since the 1950s and it was briefly held by the Chinese in 1962. Don&rsquot miss the &lsquoMadhuri Jheel&rsquo a location for the Hindi film Koyla. Nearest airports are Guwahati and Tezpur, and Tawang is about 325km/8 hours from Tezpur.

Namdapha
Namdapha National Park&mdashthe third largest in India&mdashis all things wonderful. Part of a sub-region of the Eastern Himalaya, this is one of the rich&shyest areas for biodiversity in the subconti&shynent. With nearly 100 mammals includ&shying the Hoolock Gibbon, and this is only protected habitat that harbours four big cat species tigers, leopards, clouded leopards and snow leopards. It has an abundance of bird population with 420 avian species on record. No surprise, it makes for a birder&rsquos paradise. The town of Miao is the entry point for Namdapha and it is 160km from Dibrugarh airport.

Ziro
A 1,058sq km plateau that&rsquos topographically cut off from the rest of the world and an old ethnic tribe that worships nature. That&rsquos Ziro, home to the Apatani people, known for their rare system of paddy&ndashfish cultivation in fact, so highly productive and unique is their way of cultivating rice and preserv&shying the ecology that it is a proposed Unesco World Heritage Site. The tribe warmly welcomes visitors during its agri&shycultural festivals Myoko, Murung and Dree, but the region is also known for the annual Ziro Festival of Music. Ziro is 261km from Guwahati