Places to visit in Agartala

Tripura a small landlocked state in North East India bordering Bangladesh. If you look at the map of India, Tripura looks like a finger dipped into Bangladesh. Ignored by most tourists, it is very less visited state. During our recent travel to North East India, we had about little more than 2 days in Tripura. We made Agartala, the capital of Tripura as our base during this short trip. This post explains the our experience of our visit to various places near Agartala.

Flag lowering ceremony at India Bangladesh border

As mentioned in the post here, this was the first activity we did after landing in Agartala. It was a nice experience.

Ujjayanta Palace

This is the former palace of the kings of Tripura. Constructed in 1899, it is now converted to a museum. We visited this place after the flag lowering ceremony. Our idea was to see the night view of the palace. There was an entrance fee, but the shocking aspect was the charge for SLR cameras. They were collecting ridiculous amount of Rs 500 for SLR camera. We did not feel it worth to pay that money and kept it in the locker!!

The Palace looked nice in the night, but millions of mosquitos were swarming the place. While many people were oblivious of it, and I was not surprised but we found it difficult to spend time outside for long time. We rushed into the museum to escape from those mosquitos.

The museum had artefacts on North Eastern states. I do not know how reliable the information was provided in the museum after seeing a photo of Jog falls marked as Vantawng falls in Mizoram. Since photography was not allowed in the museum, I could not take that photo. I think Don Bosco museum in Shillong is a better place to understand about North East India.

Unakoti

We visited Unakoti on our second in Tripura. I have already written about our experience here.

Tripura Sundari Temple

We had our flight to Bengaluru in the evening and we visited couple of places near Agartala before heading to the airport. The first place was Tripura Sundari Temple, an important religious shrine in Tripura. Situated on a hillock next to Kalyansagar lake, it is about 56 km from Agartala. This is a simple temple with a unique architecture. We visited early in the morning and the place was very peaceful.

Neer Mahal

Neer Mahal means water palace. It was built by the Bikram Kishore Manikya, the last Maharaja of Tripura in 1930 AD. Built in the middle of Rudrasagar lake, it was his summer palace. He seemed to be inspired by the Jal Mahal of Rajasthan.

It was about an hour drive from Tripura Sundari Temple. We hired a boat to reach the Palace. The Palace was very luxurious. The Maharaja seemed to had lot of fun time during his life. Anyway, I think this is one of the nice places to visit in Tripura.

Other places

As I mentioned, we had little time in Tripura and hence we missed few places.

• Boxanagar : Ruins of Temple
• Pilak: Hostoric place with many temples of Hindus and Buddhists
• Kamalasagar Kali Temple
• Jampui hills
• Dumboor lake: Far from Agartala but the lake looks really beautiful with hundreds of islands.

Few points

• While many of us think Tripura as a tribal state, tribal people only make 30% of the population and are mainly in the hills. Partition led to the massive change in the demography of the state. Today, Bengali is the official language in Tripura.
• In order to protect tribal areas, they are now declared as autonomous councils.
• Tripura is a peaceful state today free of all sorts of insurgency.
• Autos are easily available in Agartala. The price quoted by them was also reasonable.
• There are couple of good vegetarian restaurants in Agartala – Mrs. Banyan, a South Indian restaurant and Sherowali sweets and fast food.