Most people see Meghalaya from a car window. Here is how to get out of it.

Your driver meets you at Lokpriya Gopinath Bordoloi airport and takes you to the hotel. The afternoon belongs to Kamakhya Temple on Nilachal hill — one of the fifty-one Shakti Peethas and the busiest temple in the Northeast. On a weekday the queue moves in ninety minutes; on a Saturday allow two hours and go early. The sanctum is small, dark and genuinely powerful; the outer courtyard is where the priests sell red hibiscus and goat blood touches the stone in the background. Come prepared for both.

At dusk the driver takes you to the Brahmaputra ghat for the sunset cruise past Umananda — the smallest inhabited river island in the world, with a Shiva temple on it that was built in 1594. The river is two kilometres wide here and the light at six o'clock is worth the hour on the water. Skip the hotel dinner and eat at a Dhaba on the ghat road instead; the fish curry is the dish, not the dal.

Five hours east on NH-27, the road running along the Brahmaputra floodplain with tea estates on the right and the river occasionally visible on the left. You pass through Nagaon and the Jakhalabandha belt, where the highway cuts through the buffer zone of the park itself. Check in at your lodge on the Kohora range boundary by mid-afternoon. The lodges here are basic jungle camps with good food — half board is standard and the kitchen closes at nine, so eat when they tell you.

The evening is an Assamese Bihu dance at the resort — a folk performance, not a tourist show; the dancers are from the surrounding villages and the drumming carries. Go to bed by nine-thirty. The elephant safari leaves before five.

The elephant safari departs the Central range at 5.15 am. You sit on a pad on a trained elephant's back and move through elephant grass that stands taller than a jeep — the only way in the park to approach a rhino at close range without it running. Kaziranga holds roughly 2,600 greater one-horned rhinos, about two-thirds of the world population. You will see at least three before breakfast. Wild water buffalo, swamp deer and the occasional tigress crossing a clearing are the supporting cast.

The afternoon jeep safari runs the Western Bagori range, which is shallower grassland and better for birds — the park sits on the Central Asian Flyway and records over 480 species. Bagori is also where the swamp deer congregate in the dry months. Two safaris on the same day sounds like too much; it is not, because the animal mix is completely different and the light in each range changes the photographs entirely. Skip the cultural village tour some lodges offer in the middle of the day; it is filler.

Six hours south-west, with the landscape changing completely after Jorabat where the road climbs out of the Assam plain into the Khasi hills. The air drops five degrees in twenty minutes. Stop at Umiam Lake — the reservoir the locals call Barapani — for a viewpoint at the dam and tea at the boathouse below. Shillong sits at 1,500 metres and is considerably cooler than anything you have experienced this week.

The evening goes to Police Bazaar for dinner and Ward's Lake for a walk around the colonial-era garden. The Don Bosco Museum on Mawlai hill is the best single introduction to Northeast Indian tribal culture you will find anywhere — allow ninety minutes and get there before 5 pm, when it closes. Note: almost everything in Shillong shuts on Sunday, so if this is your Sunday, rearrange the afternoon around Ward's Lake and the Presbyterian church on Laitumkhrah.

A long day south to the Bangladesh border. At Dawki the Umngot river runs over a white sand bed so shallow and clear — from November to March — that the wooden boats appear to float on air above the riverbed. This is genuinely true in the dry months and genuinely not true after the rains, when the river runs brown and fast. If you are travelling in September or October, skip the boat and come for the border scenery and the suspension bridge instead. The boatmen charge by the hour; forty minutes is enough.

Mawlynnong is thirty kilometres east of Dawki. The community sweeps the lanes every morning and the bamboo dustbins along every path are not a prop — this is how the village has run for decades. The single-decker living root bridge at Riwai is a ten-minute walk from the car park; it is shorter and easier than the famous double-decker at Nongriat, which makes it the right one for most families. The view from the bamboo sky walk above the village reaches into Bangladesh on a clear day.

Elephant Falls on the way out of Shillong — three tiers, fifteen minutes, worth the detour. Then the two-hour drive south to Sohra, still called Cherrapunji on every signboard, which holds the world record for rainfall in a calendar year: 26,461 millimetres in 1861, a number that has not been seriously threatened since. The Sohra escarpment drops 600 metres straight into the Bangladesh plain, and in the monsoon — which is now over, but the air still carries it — every crease in the rock runs water.

Nohkalikai is India's tallest plunge waterfall at 340 metres — the pool at the base runs turquoise green and the viewpoint is five minutes from the car park. Seven Sisters falls in a row from the plateau edge across the road; the best view is from the lay-by on NH-6 rather than the ticketed point. Mawsmai cave is the easy one — 150 metres, one tight squeeze, fully lit, ten minutes. Arwah Lumshynna is darker, less visited and has marine fossils visible in the ceiling. Do both; they take an hour together.

Mawkdok Dympep valley viewpoint is on the NH-6 just before the descent begins — a wide gorge running down into the Khasi foothills, and the standard stop before the long drive. From Cherrapunji to Guwahati airport is four and a half hours under normal conditions; the Shillong bypass and the Khanapara stretch into the city add thirty to sixty minutes in the afternoon. We schedule departure flights after 4 pm, or arrange an overnight in Guwahati if your connection is earlier.

One thing worth doing if you have a morning flight or an early afternoon and energy left: the Amchong tea estate is thirty minutes from Guwahati airport and runs guided walks through 1,500 acres of tea garden with tasting at the end. It is a gentler landing than an airport departure hall.