Mustering up huge reserves of willpower, I decided on a culinary break from all the smoked pork, sticky rice cakes, pickled meat, fish wrapped in banana leaf, soya beans curry and of course, rice beer. Uncle’s ‘hunter’ son offered to accompany me up a trek to the nearby ‘Puliebadze hill’. My stomach was feeling and beginning to look like that of the sow in the sty below my room – the sow that kept charging into the asbestos walls at full speeds, get knocked over with an ear-shattering clang and wail full throttle for 20 minutes – every day at exactly 3:00 a.m. So, on the morning of the third day of the seven-day festival, I started up this ‘unlisted’ hill. The Mount Saramati, at 3.840 metres is the tallest mountain, followed by Japfu Peak (3.048 metres) and Mount Pauna. While each of these is a few hours’ drive from Kohima, the Puliebadze is only a few minutes’ drive – 8 km till the Jotsoma village, where you park your vehicle and begin the climb. Story: Pulie was a brave farmer who fought a serpent which used to eat up all his harvest. The serpent swallowed Pulie and he became a spirit. When Pulie’s family came looking for him, they could only hear his voice which kept going farther and farther. The family realising what had happened, kept a chair in the field, told Pulie ‘to be seated’ – Pulie-badze – and left. History: In addition, this verdant hill sides had also been witness to some gut-wrenching battle scenes during the Second World War when the Japanese troops attacked Kohima, to expand their ‘Prosperity Sphere’. I suggest you get your fill of this history from the war museum before you begin the climb so that you don’t deprive a soaring imagination as you pant your way up – for me, I took out my dao and told, sort of unkindly, to my hunter buddy to pretend he was a Jap.