Brahmaputra river cruises

Assam sits in India’s north-east region – an area connected to the rest of the country by a sliver of land around 20 km wide between Bangladesh and Nepal. The north-east often sees itself as underrepresented by mainstream Indian media, and tourism numbers.

“What you notice most about the guests is that most folk are like-minded,” says Sanjay Oberoi, sales director at our partner Bespoke India Travel. “They tend to have travelled a lot. Often guests are there in India on their third or fourth visit.”

There’s well-trodden, and then there’s distinctly untrodden – by cruising the Brahmaputra you’re visiting a place that’s less visited by Indian visitors – let alone international ones.

This is a quiet area of the country, especially if your experiences of India to now have been major cities, and the focus of cruising is on smaller villages and towns, and wildlife areas.

“For someone like me, who enjoys history, wildlife and community interactions… all with wonderful Assamese cuisine, it’s ideal,” says Sanjay, “It’s slow travel, but where life feels full.”

Your lazy cruise belies the mightiness of the river, which destroys its banks every year and causes massive flooding during monsoon time. In the dry season, boats can haul themselves against soft sandbanks, and anchorages are peaceful. Cruises venture gently upstream and downstream following a lazy course: past fishers netting their catches in woven jute baskets, and past villages and farms known for silk and sugar cane production.

River cruising, unlike seagoing, allows for frequent stops, and you can expect daily breaks at bankside villages and towns. Stops might include Tezpur, where you can visit the city’s temples and shrines by electric rickshaw, or Sualkuchi, a town with a silk weaving tradition that is thought to date from the 11th century.

On still days, the river has a flattening effect on the landscape; mirroring the sky, it can seem like objects are floating into view. Against this flat palette of silvery blues and tans, it’s easy to pick out birdlife, of which there’s lots, and notice every flicker of movement on the bank – or keep your eyes on the water to spot rare Ganges river dolphins.

“It has huge appeal for wildlife enthusiasts,” say Powell Ettinger from our partner, The Small Cruise Ship Collection, who run our eight-day river cruises on the Brahmaputra. The river cuts through one of the best wildlife parks in the region, Kaziranga National Park.

“Kaziranga is the home of the majority of Asian one-horned rhinos, as well as tigers, lots of wildlife and fantastic birdlife,” says Powell. The park almost singlehandedly brought rhinos back from extinction at the end of the 20th century. While its tall, prevalent elephant grass conceals a high concentration of Bengal tigers, the rhinos are far easier to spot. Most cruises include time in the park, though you’ll disembark and explore the area on land by jeep, heading to the popular western range, which has the highest rhino concentration.

You might decamp to a smaller boat to visit the lesser-known Nameri National Park – reached with a drive, and then best explored by floating down the Jia-Bharali River which cuts through it. The park is known for its elephant populations and birdlife.

Sometimes the river is so wide, and the braids of sandbanks and islands so many, that it’s hard to distinguish the shore. The river obliterates and becomes a disorientating plain, the landscape a mirage at the very edge of your view.

You might stop on a sandbank for a barbecue, and the flames will add more smoke to the obscuring heat haze. And then again the sky will clear, and the eastern Himalayas hove into view – the mountains where the Brahmaputra originates are just to the north. Extraordinary as it seems, the river is thought to be older than the mountains, originating before they were formed, over 20 million years ago. The Brahmaputra River is a flattening force, but with views like these, a vacation on it can come with fantastic emotional highs.