It can swell to five miles wide during the rainy season, and it reaches 135m at its deepest point (that’s enough to swallow the London Eye or a fair-sized skyscraper). Most importantly for Jorhat, the landscape it shapes is one of only two places in the world where tea grows natively.

A couple of centuries ago, this whole region would have been covered with vast tracts of temperate rainforest and riverine grassland, home to wild elephants, tigers, rhinoceros and hoolock gibbon, ruled over by the Ahom Kingdom and dotted with indigenous Singpho villages. This all changed when the British began cultivating tea in Assam in the 19th century, bringing with them indentured labourers from other parts of India, who stayed on after the colonisers left and have become known as the ‘Tea Tribes’.

Today, Jorhat is a stunning, vivid green patchwork of tea gardens dotted with tea pickers in wide-brimmed hats and Scottish colonial bungalows. This is the biggest producing region in India, and it’s a wonderful place to wander through lush tea fields, observing as the leaves are picked, withered, crushed, oxidised, roasted and packed. Assam tea is prized for its bright colour and strong, malty flavour, and is often part of ‘breakfast’ blends – so there’s a chance your morning cuppa has its roots somewhere near Jorhat.

Jorhat city itself a get-in, get-out kind of place (while you’re in, try the spicy pani puri and szechuan momos), but a stay at a plantation bungalow is a wonderful stop on the way between Kaziranga National Park and Majuli Island, showcasing three entirely different, but equally beautiful Assamese landscapes.