Meghalaya — 'abode of clouds' in Sanskrit — is India's wettest state, home to the world's longest caves, the world's most biodiverse plateau forests, and the world's most extraordinary living architecture: bridges grown from the aerial roots of rubber trees over centuries.
The living root bridges of the Khasi hills are bioengineering of a completely different order from anything else called architecture. The Khasi people trained the aerial roots of the ficus elastica across wooden scaffolding over rivers, year by year, generation by generation, until the roots had thickened and fused and the scaffolding could be removed. The longest spans are 30 metres and several centuries old. The double-decker bridge at Nongriat is 30 metres long, strong enough to carry fifty people at once, and still growing — becoming stronger, not older.
Cherrapunji and nearby Mawsynram together hold the record for the highest rainfall ever measured on earth — Mawsynram averages 11,872 millimetres per year, compared to the Amazon basin's 2,300 millimetres. The landscape this rainfall creates is not the sodden grey one might expect but a verdant, cloud-wrapped plateau of extraordinary beauty: waterfalls that drop into valleys too mist-filled to see the bottom.
The Khasi and Jaintia people who inhabit this terrain have a matrilineal social structure that passes property, clan membership, and familial identity through the female line — one of the last functioning matrilineal cultures of significant size anywhere in Asia. The Mawphlang Sacred Forest, 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.