'I remember when I was young the monsoons in Assam' and with that opening line, I settle back into my armchair at the Mancotta Heritage Tea Bungalow to listen to my host Sanjay of East India Travel Co.

Assam is full of stories – of how the first tea planters arrived and how, at 450 million kilogrammes of tea a year, it now produces half of the world’s production, of how the Ahom kings built their kingdom from 1228-1826 and repelled 17 Mughal invasions, and of how it is the least developed in tourism because even domestic travellers stay away because of lingering perceptions of border strife and because, well, it just seems another world away.

Arriving in the small town of Dibrugarh from the heaving metropolis of Kolkatta is like slipping into a quiet tributary from the mighty Brahamaputra river, on which we will be spending time during this 10-day Tea and Wildlife Adventure of Assam.

Except of course there is nothing quiet about India especially on its roads which seem to be more public gathering areas for dogs, cows, goats and humans than they are a conduit to somewhere, and “blow horn” is the anthem of the road.

Trains, cars, bicycles, motorbikes, cows, goats, dogs, people – they all share the road in India. It seems chaotic to us but somehow it seems to work.

The Mancotta Heritage Tea Bungalow is the former residence of the manager on this tea estate. We have the entire house to ourselves and sitting by the fireplace, and sipping Assam tea with biscuits, you are transported to a different era.

In the morning, we set off to the Ethelwold Tea Estate, a 100-year-old business founded by an Englishman who named the enterprise after his daughter.

We learnt all about tea processing, from plucking to drying to being put through the CTC process (Cut, Tear & Curl, which sounds rather like something that happens at a hair salon) and fermenting and finally being put in bags to be sent to the auction house, its price to be determined by tea brokers.

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