Meghalaya

Meghalaya is the wettest state in India and one of the wettest places on earth — its southern slopes receive between 10,000 and 15,000 millimetres of rain annually in valleys that make the Amazon basin look arid.

The living root bridges of the Khasi hills are the state's most singular cultural achievement: bridges grown from the aerial roots of the Ficus elastica tree, trained across bamboo scaffolding over rivers, generation by generation, until the roots have thickened and fused and the scaffolding is no longer necessary. The process takes 10 to 15 years to produce a usable bridge and 50 to 100 years to produce a strong one. The finest specimens span 15 to 30 metres and are so structurally robust that they carry the weight of loaded trucks.

The Mawphlang Sacred Forest near Shillong — protected by Khasi religious tradition rather than government legislation, which is why it survives — covers 75 hectares of subtropical highland forest where no tree or stone has been removed for at least a thousand years. The result is a closed-canopy forest of such biomass density that ecologists use it as a reference point for understanding what the entire plateau once looked like.

Places to Visit in Meghalaya

• Living Root Bridges, Cherrapunji
• Dawki river
• Mawlynnong village
• Seven Sisters Falls

Things to Do in Meghalaya

• Living root bridge trek
• Crystal-clear river boating at Dawki
• Cave exploration