Dimapur (and an introduction to Nagaland)

See also my post on Kohima, Khonoma, Kigwema, and the Hornbill Festival and my posts on Nagaland's music and books (with a small film section). For pictures of our whole Nagaland trip, my wife made a highlights thing on Instagram.

Table of Contents:

Nagaland Introduction

Nagaland Food

Dimapur - Introduction

Dimapur - Things to Do

Dimapur - Food & Cafes

Nagaland Introduction

I spent about a month and a half in Nagaland while working remotely from late October to early December 2024. We were primarily in Dimapur and Kohima, Nagaland’s two biggest towns, and we visited some surrounding villages of Kohima (the highlight being Khonoma). We also attended the great Hornbill Festival which happens in the first week of December just outside of Kohima. We wanted to explore more, but everything is far away on bad roads and network connectivity is an issue. Dimapur is the only place with an airport or train station, and Kohima is around two hours away.

I had a great time in Nagaland and have wonderful memories. I was frustrated a lot when I was there though. I had some paragraphs explaining why, but ultimately it boils down to Nagaland not being ideal for the long stays that we do, at least not for my preferences. I don’t want to harp on that, though. The handful of places we went would have made for an amazing 7-10 day trip, if not stimulating enough for me for the 1.5 months we spent there. I met many people (my wife included) who rank Nagaland among their favorite places. Maybe you’ll be one of them. Keep in mind I like places that have a million attractions to visit and a million places to eat and an endless supply of fascinating reading material and a vast range of local music and nice movie theaters and so on. Obviously Nagaland isn’t that.

I would love to go back to explore further though. I would just take off work and travel rather than attempt another workation. I think that would be the plan for any future northeast India trip. Nonetheless I’m glad I went and spent too much time there. I got a lot out of it even if I was understimulated.

I’ll give details on my itinerary, which as I said would make a great trip for around a week, which is perfect for most people. I would also recommend timing a trip to coincide with the Hornbill festival or another cultural festival, if possible (most regions have their own smaller festivals).

Beyond where I went, I found it confusing to decide where to go. I didn’t see a lot of good information on traveling in Nagaland. I really wanted to go to the Mon district, though, which seemed more traditional with its cool architecture and heavily tattooed village elders (see Longwa village at the border, split between India and Myanmar), and it also has the high end Konyak Tea Retreat which many people recommended. But this was all very far away on what I’m told are bad roads, and the decent looking places to stop on the way (Wokha and Mokokchung) didn’t seem all that exciting after spending so much time in Kohima. We had planned to spend a few more weeks doing all this, but it was all just too complicated and expensive and hectic and uncomfortable and cold and we decided to give up and save it for another trip.  

A lack of good information available is one of the things that frustrated me about Nagaland, as did a lack of professionalism to many things. Sometimes this was charming as we found out by chance about fascinating places with no info online, or walked by some really lovely cafe that isn’t even on google maps. But many times it was very irritating, such as when we tried going to places that were mysteriously closed with no announcement anywhere and no contact number, or when we contacted places to see if they were open, showed up an hour later, and they were mysteriously closed, or when we wasted half an hour walking around because a google maps location was incorrect. All of these are normal parts of traveling, and I blame myself for some of it (I should really ask for directions more), but it happened here with a regularity that has never happened to us anywhere else. (How about the times we called places to see if they were open, showed up and found them closed, called them and they told us they were open, we told them we were there and they were in fact closed, and they said “Oh sorry I think we forgot to open the shutters.” Like come on people.) But though this was all frustrating at the time, writing this several months later I just find it amusing. I guess there’s a lesson here.

I said the following in my Meghalaya post and I feel the same way about Nagaland too (I think I’d feel this way about the northeast in general):

We always plan and arrange everything ourselves, mainly for financial reasons but also because I like researching and doing everything myself. But honestly, my top recommendation in Meghalaya would be to just reach out to a good boutique travel agency and say “Hey, I want to go to some amazing, beautiful places and have the best local food and cool cultural experiences that aren’t touristy, please figure it all out and arrange my stays and transportation and make sure I don’t spend more than three hours in the car in a single day and I’ll pay you a million rupees.”

But if you can’t or don’t want to do that you can read on I guess. Two tour groups that looked good to me are Chalohoppo and India Trail (we did a group hike with the latter).

Nagaland is, quite obviously, unlike anywhere else in India, or anywhere for that matter. When an American friend who hadn’t heard of Nagaland asked me what it was like, I gave him a not very politically correct but nonetheless totally accurate description that the people look Chinese, have traditional aesthetics similar to Native Americans, are Christian, listen to American Christian country-rock music, have accents that are a fusion of Indian, American, and East Asian, many people eat dogs (well, they eat everything, really), and the teenagers dress super stylishly and listen to K-Pop. As a cherry on top, there’s a long running insurgency fighting for independence. How quirky!

The cities (or rather, small towns) are kind of boring as cities but are exotic enough to be really interesting for a few days, particularly due to their crazy wet markets. And they’re oddly fancy by not nice third or fourth or whatever tier Indian city standards. They have some of the fanciest cafes in India, plus nice art galleries and book stores and grocery stores and cold pressed juice shops and fashion and interior design (whenever we asked people what was up with this, we were just told it’s because of a love for South Korean culture, that doesn’t explain it to me but okay). These fancy places are also more likely to have squat toilets than similarly fancy places elsewhere in India, but then the squat toilets are cleaner and more likely to have toilet paper than elsewhere in India. Nagaland’s cities feel both more eastern and western than the rest of India (not a contradiction), and only a bit Indian. (Also spotted in Nagaland: some restaurants give plastic gloves to people eating burgers or sandwiches, apparently a thing in South Korea, and some public bathrooms have a cloth towel hanging to dry your hands, thanks but I’ll just let my hands stay wet.)

Nagaland is also the most Christian place I’ve ever been, both in how it feels and as a statistical fact. Percentage wise, it’s the most Baptist place in the world. That doesn’t mean anything to me, but it explains an American orientation to its Christianity. There’s the Christian country and rock music played at cafes. When I was there, posters were everywhere for a famous African American televangelist who was coming to Kohima for an event. There’s a Billy Graham road (and here are pictures of Billy Graham’s 1972 visit, complete with a Naga outfit). Everything is closed on Sundays. Bible quotes are prominently displayed at fancy cafes and on people’s Instagram profiles. Churches seem central to community life, and you’ll hear hymns if you walk around on Sunday. There are numerous Christian book stores which had “We Stand With Israel” stickers on the door and small sections of paraphernalia from the Holy Land including Israeli flags, shofars, menorahs, seder plates, whatever “Anointing Oil” is, and more! No, I don’t understand it either.

(In addition to the countless coffee shops, there are numerous coffin shops. I've never seen so many coffin shops in my life. At first I thought it made sense, as Nagaland is Christian. But that only explains why they need more coffins than elsewhere India, it doesn't explain why they apparently need more coffins than other parts of the world that bury people. But maybe most of the world gets their coffins from larger coffin manufacturers and shops rather than small factory stores like you see here? India doesn't have the demand to mass manufacture coffins so it is only done locally in areas where demand is high? There are also a lot of tombstone shops where you can watch them chisel.)

While the cities are mostly modern and Christian and people have moved on from many of the old ways of life, there’s a lot of interest in showcasing Naga aesthetics (I found more of this here than in Meghalaya). There are numerous local crafts that are widely available and many modern takes on Naga fashion and design. Though modern Naga architecture is limited, there’s some cool bamboo architecture, and homestays we stayed at had traditional Naga kitchen setups for show. Modern Nagaland is still finding its identity, and young people are looking elsewhere, but it was nice to see these things. 

The villages are a different world. More exotic. Very beautiful and in some cases incredibly idyllic and charming. I wish I got to visit more of them. There are no great historical sites to visit, but many villages offer stunning views of rolling hills and rice terraces, and you can often see the village’s old morungs, the dorms where boys used to live and learn the ways of the tribes.

The people everywhere are notably friendly, warm, and hospitable, more than most places that I go. People seemed happy to have us there, curious to talk to us, and eager that we enjoy Nagaland. The young, relatively well off people were worldly and easy to talk to, more so than I expected from people in these small remote towns. And people are pretty chill. I’ll copy and paste something I wrote in my Shillong post, but it applies equally well here: “to put it bluntly, it’s… more civilized than the rest of India. The infrastructure is poor, but it ends up being nicer than most places in India because people are pretty well mannered, aren’t so loud, don’t push, don't hassle you, etc (I always wondered why it was so common for people from the Northeast to turn up in the hospitality industry in big cities but now it makes perfect sense). Women have a larger presence in public life and clearly have more freedoms and face less harassment.”

I knew little about Nagaland before going. The state is made up of 17 tribes, 15 of which are classified as Naga tribes. There are 15 more Naga tribes in Manipur and 3 in Arunachal Pradesh, plus a handful more in Myanmar (all of these numbers depend on who’s counting). Though the different Naga tribes have many similarities and may appear to be the same to outsiders, they are each distinct and separate, with varying origins, myths, customs, political structures, and, most significantly, languages. All Naga tribes speak a Tibeto-Burman language, but for the most part they are mutually unintelligible, and tribes would historically communicate with sign language. There was no written language before the Christian missionaries. The collective “Naga” identity is a modern one, and the largely isolated tribes were never unified (and were frequently in conflict) up until 20th century Naga nationalist movements which got them their own state within India but not their own country as many groups wanted.

Nagaland’s history is fascinating. The origins of the numerous tribes are largely mysterious, given that there’s no recorded history, but there are scattered tidbits that paint a compelling if incomplete portrait. Some tribe’s oral histories speak of migrants from Mongolia forced into slave labor to work on the Great Wall of China, only to rebel and seek refuge elsewhere before finally settling in the Naga hills. Other oral histories speak of natural disasters, including droughts and floods, that caused their migrations, possibly from Tibet or southern China or Myanmar. Some tribal origin stories give no hint at anything historical, with people emerging from the earth or from the site of a mythical banyan tree. Some evidence even suggests seafaring origins, given aesthetic and cultural similarities between them and tribal peoples in Southeast Asia (for example) as well as the use of conch shells as ornaments and what appear to be boat shaped architectural features.

Despite their isolation, some tribes did have interactions with the outside world. There were raids into the plains, but there was also trade and cooperation with the Ahom kingdom (the former rulers of present day Assam). Oral histories speak of haats in Assam, and there are stories of Ahoms seeking refuge in the Naga Hills in times of conflict and even of Nagas joining Ahom regiments and a Naga girl marrying an Ahom prince. It was through these interactions that the Nagamese creole language emerged, today a lingua franca in Nagaland.

They were also connected to global trade. The foreword to the book The Naga Treasures: Tribal Adornment from the Nagas India and Myanmar talks about beads possibly from Nepal, Burma, and China coming to Nagaland via Tibet, European (possibly Venetian) beads potentially coming via Calcutta and Dacca, and carnelian beads via Cambay in Gujarat. Seashells and cowrie shells came from Calcutta, and “Indian chank shells (Turbinella pyrun) were sliced, cut and transformed specifically for the Naga market.” Their purchasing power came from “rubber, sugarcane, salt, cotton, cardamon, medical herbs, beeswax and other natural products.” 

From another source, with more info on what they traded: “The Angami and other Naga tribes trade in beads and other manufactured items with other Naga tribes and with their Assamese neighbors. The Ao trade pan, cotton, chilies, ginger, gourds, mats, and the gum of the liyang tree to obtain salt and dried fish from traders in the plains. These commodities are then traded to the Phoms and Changs in Exchange for pigs and fowl. The Ao also trade in wild tea seed with plains dwellers. Certain Ao villages grow cotton, the surplus of which is traded in the plains for salt.” I have no idea what the timeline is for any of these trade routes, but it’s super interesting.

Of course, everything changed with the arrival of the British, missionaries, WW2, independence and separatist movements, etc, but that’s all covered widely everywhere else so I don’t feel a need to discuss it. Check out my reading list if you want more. I also thought about writing more about traditional Naga culture, the morungs and the headhunting and all that, but that’s also covered widely elsewhere and honestly Christ and K-pop seem more relevant to Nagaland today. In some ways I find the Christian parts of Northeast India to be less interesting than most other parts of India because large chunks of the traditional culture have been uprooted. The cliche that India adds but never subtracts doesn’t apply here, for better or worse. 

I like to stay away from anything remotely political or controversial, but I’ll say that in the past when I’ve gone to parts of India with separatist movements I’ve always been like “lol come on guys you’re so Indian just accept it.” But in Nagaland… I guess the way I’d put it is that if I were Naga I probably wouldn’t want to be Indian. I don’t know if the alternatives would have been any better, and the separatist movements probably just did a lot of bad for their people, as these things go, but at least they made emotional sense to me. When I saw expressions such as “Naga by birth, Indian by accident” I was like “yeah, that sounds right, even if making that statement core to my identity isn’t the approach I would take to helping my people or living a fulfilling life.”

It was funny to hear people refer to “mainland India.” (We did experience a bit of anti-Indian racism. One guy berated us and called us “people from South.” I found that kinda funny on several levels, one of them being that I’m not Indian.)

Despite what has been a tragic history, I’m glad the state’s troubles have largely subsided and many people are starting to benefit significantly from the growing tourism sector. I felt hopeful about Nagaland’s future, and it was nice to meet young people who studied outside of Nagaland and came back to start cool small businesses. With that said, I heard a number of people say (as they did in Meghalaya) that the only good jobs are for the government, so that tempers my optimism.

Food In Nagaland

I loved the food in Nagaland, and I wanted to give some brief notes up front here so I can jump into the recommendations in the posts.

But first I’ll complain a bit that there’s not a lot of good commercially available vegetarian food. Naga food is actually very vegetarian friendly, and we did get a lot of wonderful local food over the course of our stay, but only a few restaurants serve anything beyond very very basic thalis with rice, dal, and boiled veggies. There are exceptions, like Dimapur’s excellent restaurant Ethnic Table, and we also had incredible food at the Hornbill fest, but for the most part the food we had when out and about was very uninteresting. We ended up eating a lot of noodles, which to me is a lame thing to do in a place that has a very distinctive and delicious local cuisine, and where markets are bursting with wonderful produce. Homestays are a better bet, and we had some really outstanding Naga food at our homestays, but they still mostly served north Indian food and there’s a general assumption that we won’t like Naga food. There was one homestay we were at for five nights and we didn’t have a single local dish despite requesting it for every meal. I probably had aloo gobi for half of my meals in Nagaland. I guess this is what happens when a place’s tourism is geared towards Indians. Sad. 

But if you insist you want Naga food you’ll get it eventually. And if you eat meat then you’ll be fine, restaurants will have plenty of options and homestays make the meat dishes for themselves anyway. From my travels and from what I read, vegetarian dishes (beyond basic sides such as boiled veggies and chutney) seem more commonly prepared in rural areas but are less common amongst middle class families in the cities who can afford to eat meat with every meal. At our homestay in Khonoma, our host said that she mostly eats vegetarian, eating meat only on special occasions.

Like anywhere, Nagaland’s food has its own regional nuances and different tribes have different cuisines. I won’t pretend that I understand the regional differences at all, though we sampled the food of a number of different tribes and there are clear differences. Some people claimed one tribe’s food was more accessible, or spicier, or stinkier, but sometimes these would contradict what other people told us. (“No no our food is is mild, not stinky, it is their food that is stinky.”) I’ll just tell you that despite finding vegetarian food being a challenge, whenever I did find the good stuff it was really delicious! Also, I think everything we ate fit well enough into a broad family, so I don’t think it is too reductive to speak about “Naga food.”

The most talked about aspect of Naga food is the fermented bean paste axone, or other similar fermented stuff that people deride as stinky. (There was even a film about it.) I happen to love it, and it’s similar to thua nao which I’ve had in Northern Thailand. It’s earthy and funky and for some reason reminds me of dog food, but the way it’s used is really delicious and more subtle than how it smells, and in no way do I find the smell unpleasant (not like Meghalaya’s tungrymbai, that stuff was intense). 

I only ate one thing in Nagaland that I would describe as weird and unpleasant, and that was some herb in a stew that had a blue cheese taste. No idea what that was. I would have thought it was some mistake if I didn’t have it in two different meals. But other than that I felt everything was pretty accessible and I don’t think I had a single proper meal that I didn’t love. (By “proper meal” I’m excluding the basic boring ones.) I don’t know what tribes use perilla and sesame seeds in the sauces, but that stuff was always really great.

The produce in Nagaland tended to be excellent, with some of the best fruits and vegetables in India (if only there were restaurants serving these things!). There were great pumpkins and mushrooms (rarely on menus, but never turn down a chance to get the local mushrooms if they have them). Simple cooked greens were really delicious. The Nagaland pineapples, in season when I was there from late October through early December, were probably the best pineapples I’ve ever had, with the perfect balance of sweet and tangy (my wife preferred the sweeter, less sour Meghalaya pineapples, but she is wrong). The papayas were among the best ever (usually I only like papaya with lime on it, here I felt wrong adding lime because I didn’t want to distract from the purity of the delicious papaya). I had some very unusual fruits I’ve never seen before, which is hard to accomplish these days, though I probably saw weird local fruits in the market less than I did in Meghalaya. I know there are rare wild banana varieties here but I don’t recall trying any exciting bananas.

The biggest surprise for me is that the rice was really delicious. I’m not a rice connoisseur. I don’t have a refined rice palate. More of a bread guy, to be honest. I notice broad differences, like fat red rice is very different taste and texture wise from long grained white rice or black sticky rice. But the more precise nuances elude me. I usually fail to detect the aromas in the aromatic rice. I’ve been to Michelin starred restaurants where they’ve talked up the provenance of the rice, the basmati rice grown in the foothills of the Himalayas and aged for two years, the jasmine rice from the same farms that provide the Thai royal family, etc, and I’m always like “yeah, it is definitely rice.”

But the rice in Nagaland is the best I’ve ever had? I think I only noticed this in Kohima and Khonoma? (Obviously there are numerous varieties and obviously I don’t know them.) It was just white rice. It didn’t look or smell special to me. But it was sweet and smooth and creamy. I got black sticky rice a few times too, always good, though it’s not commonly served at least in the places I went.

Dried beans were also consistently amazing too. Always order beans if they have them. (Note that most bean dishes are cooked with meat.)

Some quirky non-Naga food Nagaland food things I noticed are that people seem to leave butter outside the fridge and the Amul butter has a blue cheese smell, and people also mostly use milk powder as actual milk is harder to digest (there’s no historic dairy culture).

Dimapur

I spent roughly a week and a half in Dimapur. You do not need to spend so long there. Most people are basically there in transit before heading in and out of the Naga Hills, given that it is the only place in Nagaland with flight and train connectivity. It’s a ridiculously dusty small town without much character, so I don’t blame people for mostly giving it a pass. I think it’s actually the dustiest place I’ve ever been, which is pretty impressive considering I’ve been in India almost a decade. The dust gets in your ears. It gets in your eye brows and lashes. It cakes up on your skin. Usually an N95 is enough to protect me from the intrusive elements of India but if I go back to Dustapur, I mean Dimapur, I’ll come equipped with goggles and hairnets and some less politically charged version of a keffiyeh. I don’t know if any of my readers wear a burqa but it’s not a bad idea here. A beekeeper’s uniform would definitely help. If you have a hazmat suit, bring it along.

I liked Dimapur though, and skipping it would be a mistake. Despite its general crappiness, it has a few excellent places to visit, more than most dusty small towns and even more than the capital Kohima, which is prettier and more charming and nicer to walk around but doesn’t have anything really noteworthy to see. Also, though the exteriors in Kohima are nicer, Dimapur has nicer interiors, with larger and fancier cafes and shops, a nice book store, a few great art galleries and museums, plus the really excellent restaurant Ethnic Table, one of the best regional restaurants in India. 

I found something compelling about this mix, in a “this is a strange, strange place, where the hell am I?” kind of way. There’s that cliche about India being the land of contrasts, and Dimapur might have the starkest contrasts of all? (I liked the time when my wife was shopping at Westside, which she insisted was way better than Westside in Mumbai, and I walked outside and saw a holy man riding an elephant, braving the dust storm.) It’s a grubby third world crossroads, where tribals and “mainland Indians” meet and trade and shop for junk from China that comes in through the Myanmar border, mixed with some Naga modernism and cultural sophistication, topped off with the K-pop dreams of the fancy cafes. I dug it.

So, Dimapur is probably underrated, as far as Nagaland goes. If you come to Nagaland, I’d recommend a day or two here, though note that I’m weird.

Just try to hire a car with AC. We mostly got around by very overpriced auto-rickshaws, or very very overpriced taxis that, despite the high cost, refused to close the windows and turn on the AC. This pissed me off. I usually shower only two or three times a week for water conservation purposes, but I showered daily in Dimapur. I also changed my N95 daily, even if I was only outside for an hour, while usually masks last me a few days at that rate of use.

Beyond the dust, weather wise Dimapur was hot, but not unbearably so. In October I didn’t appreciate it. After being in the cold Kohima in November and early December, I was very happy to get back to Dimapur with pleasantly warm weather for a few days before catching a train to Guwahati. The horrible chilblains I developed in Kohima cured up within 24 hours. My self-diagnosed, cold-induced, early-onset arthritis vanished. I felt 20 years younger. It was amazing. 

And though Dimapur is mostly a dusty hellscape, I love the surrounding landscape. Within 20 minutes of being on the train, the scenery was pretty stunning, and I may have liked that more than anything in the Naga Hills, which seems to be a minority view. (I always wonder what accounts for these different preferences. Is it genetic?)

That landscape was actually Assam, which Dimapur was basically carved out of. From Wikipedia: “In 1918, Dimapur was leased to then Naga Hills District (Now Nagaland) by then erstwhile Assam Province of British of India for 30 years for construction of Railways lines (unclear from which district). In 1963, it was again leased to now state of Nagaland for 99 years.” What happens in 2062, nobody knows. In the colonial era, Dimapur was developed as a regional commercial and transit hub being a gateway to the Naga Hills (all true today), and it became even more important during WW2. Dimapur isn’t an area that the Nagas had historically settled in, and it definitely feels more “Indian” than the rest of Nagaland. Wikipedia says Dimapur is only half Naga, compared to the three-quarters Naga populated Kohima (both numbers are maybe 20 percentage points lower than I expected). Still, I think the tribal aesthetics fit well with the frontier town feel of Dimapur, even if there’s no historical basis for it.

We stayed at the great Longchen Homestay, a beautiful place with excellent food and very nice, hospitable hosts Toshi (an Ao Naga) and Annie (a Mizo who grew up in Shillong). I can’t imagine there’s anywhere better to stay in Dimapur. There are a range of room options for various budgets. Some are large and fancy at the high end, but are still reasonably priced for a nice stay (I believe under 6k), while we got the cheapest rooms at around 2.5k (we got a discount since we stayed a week) which were small and basic but still clean and comfortable. 

Whichever room you get, the homestay is spread out over a large area and it’s a lovely setup with lots of greenery and a number of Naga design elements. We would work at a table overlooking rice fields and it was gorgeous, a world away from the dusty Dimapur streets (though I’ll admit it wasn’t the most comfortable place to work in late October, being that it was hot during the day and had so many insects flying around in the evening). 

The food is a highlight, too. Annie is a passionate cook who also hosts cooking classes, and given the mixed heritage of the owners, you get a taste of different cuisines from the northeast. Our meals were varied and delicious. I didn’t always know what I was eating, but it seemed like a mix of Naga, Khasi, Mizo, Assamese, and some more standard north Indian. Almost every meal made good use of the fun local ingredients. One really interesting standout dish was a local variety of long beans cooked with sesame seeds. I loved the stuffed pointed gourd. There were many varieties of local beans and greens and gourds and interesting salads and pickles and chutneys. When we went to the market and brought back unusual ingredients like roselle leaves, she whipped up some unique dishes for us. I choose homestays over hotels in hopes of getting food like this, and Longchen really delivered here. Annie is also passionate about honey and sells some interesting honeys that she sources herself, including sour honey which I hadn’t heard of before Nagaland.

So this is where all the cool kids stay when they come to Dimapur. The one and only Chef Thomas Zacharias stayed here and took a cooking class back in the day. And talk about missed connections, I found out that Vikram Seth was coming the same day we were checking out, after finishing up some bird watching in the hills. 

The stay is well located too, near the airport and just off the main road that leads to Kohima. You’re well positioned to visit most of the best things to do there, which are fairly spread out so not all close to any single place (Heirloom Naga, Chumpo Museum, Chakhesang Zuve Cultural Centre, the Kachari ruins, and some nice markets are within a 20 minute drive). There are also numerous nice cafes and the nice White Owl book store within a 20 minute drive.

You are around a 25 minute drive from the main town area, but the one time we did that drive it took an hour thanks to crazy traffic because of a bridge repair. Whether you’ll have such issues, I can’t say. Whether you want to go to the main town area, I also can’t say. I wouldn’t say there’s anything of great interest there, other than markets (though nothing you won’t see if you’re going to Kohima), fancy cafes, and the great restaurant Ethnic Table.

With that said, though the town isn’t very appealing, we spent a handful of days living down there staying in a cheap Airbnb and we enjoyed it. It’s easy to get around as autos are reasonably priced (in this part of town they are Bihari or whatever, they don’t rip you off like the Naga drivers!), things are close by and clustered together, and some parts are actually fairly walkable and not as dusty as other parts of Dimapur. And there were a million nice cafes to work from.

Things To Do

There are four great things to do in Dimapur. All are different and all are equally recommended. Decide what sounds good to you. The fifth great thing to do would be to visit markets, but if you are going to Kohima you can just do that there, as the weather is better and it’s less dusty, and there’s little else to do there anyway. I didn’t feel the markets here were noticeably special compared to the markets in Kohima. They were awesome though. Also, all of this could be done in a day, and it could even be done en route to Kohima.

I’ll start with Dimapur’s one and only historical site, the Dimasa Kachari ruins. The Dimasa people (a subgroup of Kacharis) put the “Dima” in Dimapur which was their capital between the 13th and 16th century. Here’s a good short article (archived) about it all. This is all they left behind in the area. Not one of India’s great archeological sites, but it’s fun and nice to see.

The ruins are in a nice park. There’s a cool gateway to see (the article notes “High up, on either side of the arch, is a carving of sunflowers that were originally faced with brass so as to present a dazzling spectacle when seen sparkling in the sun from afar”), but the main draw are the dozens of interestingly shaped pillars, with some fun designs on them, including more sunflowers. I noted out loud, “These pillars are cute, don't they look like mushrooms--”, but before I could complete that last word, another member of the group blurted out, "Penises!". Okay then. I honestly didn’t think of that. My alternate guess was chess pieces. (Go for the ruins, stay for the rorschach test.) 

Also of interest in this area is the Naga Bowl restaurant (not recommended for vegetarians), the adjacent Naga Bowl bakery (get the black sticky rice muffin), the massive Wednesday super market (though part of the market is still open daily, I believe), Shiro Roastery, Calm Cafe, and the Fusion store with a lot of nice looking local souvenirs, clothes, food, etc (we didn’t make it to Calm or Fusion but they looked very nice). 

The second major attraction I’ll list, and a contender for the best, is Heirloom Naga Centre, which has a crafts workshop, design studio, store, gallery, cafe, and boutique hotel. This is a surprising and beautifully conceived place that is making Naga arts, crafts, and architecture relevant to the 21st century. 

The gallery for me was a highlight, with beautiful crafts from across Nagaland in addition to modern takes on Naga design in the form of furniture and art installations, courtesy of their in-house design studio Urra Design and their crafts and furniture brand Cane Concept. I thought this was amazing stuff, and it was especially cool to see such impressive and modern high end work in a kind of random, not especially well developed corner of India. You have to pay for a tour (a few hundred per person), and there’s also the option of a tour of the workshop to learn more about the crafts and see how they’re made, though that didn’t especially interest me and anyway it wasn’t happening the day we were there.

There’s also a great shop downstairs, selling household items from Cane Concept. My wife got a Naga design laptop case which she loves and which I’ve witnessed receive numerous compliments in public. Next to the shop is a lovely cafe which I would have loved to hang out in for longer, though the vegetarian food options were just so-so. We met the founder of Heirloom Naga and her son who runs Cane Concept and Urra, they were both very nice. I didn’t find a list of places Urra did interior design for, but we were told about Nichey restaurant in Dimapur (had we found out sooner we would have gone!) and the fancy bar in the stables at Tripura Castle in Shillong which we had visited, that was a really cool place. I love their work and look forward to seeing more. Based on an Instagram post, it appears they have an upcoming project in Kathmandu.

Not far from Heirloom Naga is the third great attraction of Dimapur, the Chumpo Museum, which I had seen on Google maps but hadn’t planned on visiting because I had no idea what it actually was and if it was actually open. But then we drove by it after Heirloom Naga and asked the driver to stop so we could check it out. I’m very glad we did because it was awesome! I liked it so much I wrote a google maps review after (which I rarely ever do) because I felt The World Should Know. 

This is in the house of Abraham Lotha, an anthropologist who has written numerous books about Nagaland and whom I saw quoted in a Nagaland history book a few weeks later. He lives here part of the year and he has opened his home, beautifully decorated with crafts from Nagaland, to whoever is interested. If he isn’t around, he said that someone else will still give people a tour, but it was very cool to be able to talk to him and have him show us these rare objects that he collected. He encourages people to touch some of the objects. I found these crafts and artwork so unique and interesting, and it was even better seeing these all here than it would have been seeing them in a museum. There’s also a library there that I would have loved to check out but I didn’t have the time. Highly recommended!

The fourth and final great attraction of Dimapur might actually be my favorite: an amazing example of a traditional Naga home, but more elaborate and beautiful than any other. It is listed on Google Maps as Chakhesang Zuve Cultural Centre. It says permanently closed, and there was no contact number, but an Instagram page suggested that they might actually exist so I decided to risk 500 rupees and requested my cab to take a 10 minute detour (yes a 10 minute detour costs 500 rupees in Nagaland). I found no information about this online but was told about it by Bharat Bala (who directed the great Tamil film Maryan) whom I randomly met at Heirloom Naga Centre when he was in town making a short documentary film on “work songs” (not yet out, as of writing this, though a short video Bharat made about “trust shops” is out). Traveling is weird and random.

Thankfully the house was open, and it was amazing, with incredible wood carving and detailing. It’s by far the best architecture I saw in Nagaland. The house is the home and creation of an artist Veswuzo Phesao who studied at JJ School of Arts in Mumbai some decades ago and in recent times has run some cultural centers in Nagaland. I asked him how he liked Mumbai, thinking he’d hate the chaotic and harsh city life, but he said he loved it, which was nice to hear. Despite the language barrier I enjoyed meeting and talking to him. He and his daughter also performed a beautiful song for us. There is no cost to visit the home, but there is a donation box that I was happy to contribute to. 

Highly recommended, but I don’t think there’s any way of knowing if it’s open…

The next best thing to do in Dimapur is to visit markets. I would say this is a must do and a top priority, but you can do this in Kohima as well, where the weather is nicer and there are fewer other things to do. I imagine most people coming to Dimapur are also going to Kohima. If not, definitely check out the markets.

There are various weekly markets around Dimapur, occurring on different days of the week in addition to some regular markets. I went to two daily markets and they were highlights, though one was enough as they’re very similar in what they offer. One we went to was the Chümoukedima Saturday Market (which we combined with a visit to the White Owl book store, Juro Coffee House, and a few other shops and cafes in that mall area), and another was the Wednesday Super Market (combined with a visit to the Kachari ruins, Naga Bowl restaurant and bakery, and Shiro cafe). Both were huge and fascinating, with vast assortments of unusual produce. I recall buying fresh roselle flowers and leaves, amazing pineapples, passion fruit, pomelo, tree tomatoes, persimmons, beautiful greens, colorful beans, weird round spiky cucumbers, a fried sticky rice flour donut thing, something called Major Jenkins' fan palm fruit (you soak it in salt overnight and then the thin flesh has an olivey taste, hard to eat but interesting!), some other bizarre local things that I don’t know the name of, and more. We didn’t buy it but they had purple corn.

People sell homemade fermented things (axone, anishi, etc), local alcohol, and more. Many locals are there digging through piles of cheap clothes. Also, uh, there were lots of animals, alive and dead, some you don’t often see in markets. Animal lovers be warned, it was very sad, but it added to the crazy, exotic experience.

For a daily market, the Hong Kong market near the train station is also great. It doesn’t have the same calibre of produce as the weekly markets but it’s still a big, crazy, busy market area that is worth visiting, with separate sections for produce, meat, clothes, random junk, and more. 

I spent a bit of time walking around the area, which is older and more “Indian” than the rest of Dimapur. Nothing you won’t find anywhere else, but I saw some kinda nice Hindu and Jain temples. A surprisingly nice tiled mosque dome. Some old bungalows and scattered cool old buildings. The Hillstar Digital Cinema (I believe one of two in Dimapur, excluding one in a military area). I had fun, but it’s not really worth your time. 

That’s about all I did in Dimapur, other than going to cafes and working. I’m not sure if there’s anything else. There is the Diezephe Crafts Village but I didn’t feel a need to go out of my way to get there, nor could I figure out what exactly happens there on a daily basis. Someone mentioned a famous Hindu temple nearby, but I didn’t really care. I’m sure there are some hidden gems in Dimapur, though. There were things I saw on Google maps that I thought could be cool, but with hardly any information available I didn’t want to go out of my way and spend 1000 rupees on a dusty cab ride. 

But I had a good time just hanging out in Dimapur. Go to some cafes and chat with people. Everyone we encountered was very friendly. My wife also did pottery at two different places, Artsy Naga school near the airport and Tanemi Pottery near the town. She loved both places and it was a good way for her to make friends with similar interests. I got to meet them, cool people. If you don’t like pottery I don’t know how to make friends but you’ll figure it out.

Food & Cafes

I’ll start with Naga food and then go to cafes. 

I’m not the best resource on food here because I’m a vegetarian and honestly there’s not a ton for us. When we stayed at Longchen we ate most of our meals there as the food was great. Getting good veg food at restaurants wasn’t always easy, and we were often limited to pretty dull Naga meals that just had rice, dal, boiled veggies, and spicy chutney, which was fine the first time but quickly grew tiresome. Or noodles. We had lots of noodles which were delicious but I wasn’t exactly thrilled about eating noodles in Nagaland…

(By the way, I wrote about Naga food more broadly in the Nagaland introduction, so check that out.)

But we had exceptional food at Ethnic Table, which would rank among the very best food I had in Nagaland, and probably the only great Naga food I had that wasn’t at a homestay, a village, or the Hornbill festival. I think we ate at Ethnic Table three times and I would rank it among India’s best restaurants. Super authentic, delicious food with a menu based on fresh seasonal ingredients and dishes that you won’t find at any other restaurant. Nice setting too, and though the food is beautifully presented, it’s the real deal and never watered down flavor wise.

We mostly just ordered the “veg meals” which were very reasonably priced at 250 rupees (they could triple the price and it’d still be worth it) and had a mix of standard dishes (boiled greens, chutney, mashed yam, fried bitter gourd) and different vegetable dishes that changed every day. Some of this was insanely good. One day there was a mushroom stir fry. One day there were mushrooms cooked with beans (one of my favorite dishes I had in Nagaland). I also loved a dish of pumpkin in perilla seed sauce. There were addictive roasted beans in a delicious spice mix. None of the dishes had axone in them, but on our last night in Nagaland, sad to be leaving, I asked if they could make me a vegetarian dish with axone, and we got an excellent stew. This is Michelin star worthy food.

We tried a couple of other things as well. The pumpkin galho (rice porridge) was great and the best galho we had (as a vegetarian we felt other galhos we tried were lacking). The sticky rice meals are similar combos with sides plus a sunny-side-up, served with sticky rice that you can get cooked with sesame or perilla seeds. And I ordered a 10/10 fresh tamarind juice. For meat eaters you have an option of the meal combos or a range of a la carte dishes, and there also noodles and other “crowd pleasers” for those who want that. 

The founder and chef at Ethnic Table is Aketoli Zhimomi who won the first Naga Chef competition. I didn’t know what that was until I went to the Hornbill festival and saw the little advertised Naga Chef food area, where a handful of chefs that cleared the first rounds of the competition had stalls that anybody could eat at, including undercover judges who then rank the best. We tried two stalls at the fest and that was some of the best food I had in Nagaland (it is worth timing your Nagaland trip around the festival just to eat there), though I’m not sure if any other chefs have set up restaurants. I’m very grateful to Aketoli (who also does popups at five star hotels outside of Nagaland, keep an eye out for her!) for making such wonderful food accessible to everyone traveling to Nagaland.

We ate at a few other well regarded places but I don’t have anything to really recommend for vegetarians. Should I even mention them? You should really have all of your meals at Ethnic Table. Naga Bowl Express had one of those basic thalis which was good for what it was, and we were still hungry so we had noodles, those were good. Attached is a nice shop and a bakery that makes delicious local sticky rice muffins, I recommend those, and we got good quality bread there too. There was another restaurant called Naga Ambrosia Fiesta which actually had some more exciting vegetarian dishes, and though I enjoyed the food I didn’t feel the quality compared to Ethnic Table or to the great food we had at homestays. I liked the beans at The King Chilli, a fun restaurant if you’re in that area, but again they didn’t compare to the best we had. There were a few good looking Naga regional restaurants we called but we were told they had no vegetarian options. Outside of Naga food we had some decent Tibetan (Omakase), Korean (Mok.jaa), and Italian (Milos, a very pretty place) food, but I wouldn’t say anything was special.

The cafes were great though. Dimapur definitely has the highest quantity of nice cafes per capita in India, and in absolute terms it’s easily top ten, and probably top two outside of the mega-cities (behind only Mysore), which is pretty impressive! There are a few coffee roasters and countless cafes in town, serving great quality coffee grown in Nagaland (mostly from the roaster Nagaland Coffee, you can buy coffee beans/powder from them too), in really nice settings, with pretty spacious interiors, good AC, (generally) nice bathrooms, and fun designs, at prices that are probably around half of what they’d be in the bigger cities. At first I was confused as to why anybody with the taste and capital to set these up would want to do so in Dimapur, but then some sliver of humanity awakened in me and I remembered that most people like their homes, family, and friends. If I were Naga and from Dimapur and weren’t a cranky anti-social person, I’d start a cafe in Dimapur too. They reminded me of the cafes in Thailand, cute, happy and cheerful places.

They tended to have beautiful looking bakery items as well, though I usually skip that stuff, and little of it was novel. With that said, get the black sticky rice muffins if you see them (a few cafes source them from Naga Bowl bakery). That’s the one thing I saw that’s fairly unique to Nagaland and incorporates the local produce. I hope to see more along those lines in the future. There’s such excellent and interesting produce in Nagaland, and it deserves a showcase. You don’t even have to get too weird. Put those amazing pineapples and bananas and passion fruits to good use. Nagaland has sweeter and more flavorful pumpkins than the rest of India, how about some pumpkin pie? It isn’t a dairy region, so bakers should think about their comparative advantages more.

Unlike cafe menus in the rest of India, the food menus are notably more eastern than western oriented, and outside of the desserts, vegetarian options are pretty limited. Despite Nagaland growing avocados, which I did see in markets, I didn’t see a single avocado toast. 

We mainly went to cafes clustered in two areas, near the town and near the airport. We got iced lattes at all of these places. For the most part the iced lattes are very good, and they mostly used beans from Nagaland Coffee. If something else is noteworthy, I’ll mention it. Every place had wifi and we worked from all of these places.

In or near the town area, some favorites were: Naga Coffee Express (tiny and not on google maps, but nice, and I loved their fresh tamarind juice), Captain Cafe Americano, Upperroom (next to where my wife did pottery), Shiro (they roast themselves but when we were there they served Nagaland Coffee), Nagaland Coffee (oddly, we loved their coffee everywhere except at their own cafes, both here and Dimapur, we still liked the place though). In the area near the airport, our favorites were Juro (they roast themselves), Patio Coffeatery (I recall they used South Indian beans), and Dough Re Mi (their main branch at 3rd Mile is the largest and they have a vast array of pretty good bakery items). 

And there were many others. If you want a weird place where you can go work remotely, I guess Dimapur is recommended. Just call any place before going to make sure they’re actually open.

I’ll add a great tiny cold pressed juice shop called Chia (the only place juicing those delicious Nagaland pineapples).

Also, grocery stores tended to be pretty nice, and they have a lot of unique local products (plus overpriced Southeast Asia brands we don’t see elsewhere in India). The best looking local goods store was Fusion, though our plan to go there got derailed. Items to look out for are puffed sticky rice and millet snacks (the best ones have ground black sesame or perilla seeds) and dried wild apples. I tried a few of the fancy locally inspired sauce brands. I loved the whole range from Saucey Joe’s, all of their stuff is recommended (I sampled it all at the Hornbill fest and bought the smoked chili sauce). There was another nice brand called Roots Agro but I wasn’t able to sample the range anywhere. Since I love axone, I took home the “Kaboom Axone Chutney” but it was deadly spicy and sadly went to waste. I have above average spice tolerance but this is for hardcore masochist spice lovers only, and any amount to impart some axone flavor was too hot for me. I would try some of their others, though. 

Lastly, Nagaland grows tea. I don’t know anything about tea, but the white tea with mint that we bought from a brand called Cold Mountain was very refreshing with ice, and some CTC tea a homestay host gifted to us which my wife gave to her parents received rave reviews. Oddly, my sister emailed me when I was in Nagaland telling me that her vendor in America, who has a brand called New Mexico Tea Company, married a Naga woman, moved to Nagaland, and is starting to grow tea there. It may be some years before his tea hits the market but that’s something to look out for.