This is going to be a long post as I wish to end this travelogue.
We started drive to Cherrapunji (East Khasi Hills) next morning and stopped at Elephant Falls on the way. It was probably a great place some time back, but now it’s a typical touristy spot swarming with people who get tired even while walking down 12-14 steps. Most of the place is covered with concrete and pathways over the stream. That time the place was full of aunties wearing pungent perfumes, pot-bellied uncles, ugly whining children and selfie sessions everywhere.
We left asap and hit the road. On the way, we drove though another very foggy town and then stopped at Wahkaba waterfall. It had a large number of tourists too but since the place was bigger, it didn’t annoy me that much. The base of waterfall was about 80-90 meters below and there was no way of reaching there. The views of forested valley below were pretty nice. Along the road, a few workers were digging up a small hill. I first thought that those were caves. So when wifey was having something to eat in a shop nearby I walked over to check. Turned out yet another hill being dug up and destroyed by construction mafia for earth and rocks. Pretty disappointing. Then I saw one moron tourist pissing right in to one of the streams which led to waterfall. That idiot had asked me about directions 10 minutes before. I hope he reads it and is ashamed of it.
While we were on the road, it kept on raining almost all the time. When it wasn’t raining then it was cloudy or foggy, whatever you can call it. We stopped 2-3 times along the way to take pictures of the views. You see clouds all the while on mountains, but Meghalaya was more than just living up to it’s name. After driving for about 5 hours, we reached our destination. Guide was waiting for us 2-3 km from hotel and got in to the car with us. He was a college pass out but looked much younger.
We reached our hotel shortly Cherrapunjee Holiday Resort in Laitkynsew village. If you read about the property online or on their premises or any of probably dozens of signboards in 5-6 km stretch, you can be excused for thinking that the hotel owners made the living root bridges themselves. Never saw someone trying to take credit for anything else in such a way. When we tried to check in the lady on reception insisted that we show our marriage certificate. I was very angry and asked something like what if I arrived with a man and said that we were a homosexual couple. Would you have given a room then ? She was evasive and just kept parroting lines to the effect that it’s management policy and so on. Wifey had pictures of our wedding on the phone and thankfully that was enough for them to accept as proof of our married status. It was an expensive hotel and the rooms were not worth the money at even half price.
After leaving the luggage in our room, we left with guide to explore Latikynsew and adjacent Nongwar villages. It was a small, quiet and clean village but with a lot more cats than dogs. Most people were either at work or probably taking an afternoon siesta. The houses were mostly newish and made of concrete, thought there were a lot of old fashioned houses made of bamboo, wood, betel nut leaves and other natural stuff too. There were a few small one room eating joints on the road but most were either empty or had only 1-2 clients smoking or drinking tea. Again, the number of churches in such a small village was surprising. According to the guide, there were 250 households in the village and 3 churches in operation with another one under construction. And these were fairly big buildings, not small cottage like structures that one would expect.
We stopped at a point along the road where someone had constructed a resting shed or maybe a gazebo like structure, call it whatever you think is right. It looked over Bangladesh plains. Most of Indian side was hilly and had dense tree cover. Bangladeshi side was mostly flat and had much fewer trees. The memorial plate on the shed indicated that it was built in memory of people who did something in 1940s .I asked the guide to read it for us. The local Khasi and Garo languages don’t have any script and everything is written in Roman script, probably made popular by missionaries. It is hard enough to read Hindi written in English alphabet. Imagine trying to make sense of words like Latikynsew, Mawlynnong and similar tongue twisters.
The way locals pronounced it sounded nothing like how it was spelled.
We walked further through the village and reached edge of the forest. Some government department had built a viewing area with a good vantage point few years back with a road leading up to it from a different direction. The road was overgrown with knee high grass though. While we were entering the area, the guide almost stepped over a black snake which vanished in 2 seconds in the dense undergrowth. The views of forested hills and rivers flowing through it was pretty awesome. It was quite hot and humid though so staying in sun was impossible. We sat there for a while and rested before starting to walk back. Shortly after wifey started to feel severe itching all over her body. It was funny till she snapped at me for laughing. Thankfully there was a primary health center on our way back and it was properly staffed. The doctor gave her an injection which gave immediate relief and wrote down a prescription for a lotion. The only medical shop was closed though and the owner’s family informed that it’d open in evening. We reached hotel a few minutes before sunset and guide went back to his village. After some time, I took off to get that lotion which doctor had prescribed and also to get something to eat from the food joints we had seen earlier. Wifey stayed back and said that she’d rather eat in hotel.
By the time I reached the village road, it started raining heavily and electricity went out. Thankfully chemist shop was open and they had the lotion, but little else except from a few generic counter top medicines for sale. The eating joints we had seen during day time seemed a bit more busier and I entered 4 of those. In every single place no one could understand me or I could understand them properly. The one place where I could understand anything had only some unusual pig dish. I already had my fill of pork for a month and didn’t want to eat more pork, so walked back to hotel.
Upon reaching back, wifey informed that we had to place our dinner order within next 10 minutes otherwise the hotel kitchen will close down. The only was to place the order was go to reception itself because there were no phones in the room. We couldn’t go outside to eat because the gates were locked down after dark too. So we had to walk from our room to reception area under pouring rain to ask for dinner which took about an hour to prepare for 2 dishes. I had ordered some local dish with rice and chicken, wifey asked for some daal and vegetable. What we got was almost inedible. Even I could’ve prepared better tasting food with tyre rubber and starch. Talking about food, the owners also have a restaurant Orange Roots on way to Cherrapunji.
They serve so called unlimited thaalis for Rs 200 or more in which you have to pay upto Rs 60 for second serving of most of vegetables. Even more papad cost Rs 5 or 10. They have done a lot of publicity but run the business like a typical thieving money-lender lala shown in old Indian movies. While we were eating, 4 local men walked in and started a small song and dance performance. They mostly sang english and bollywood stuff and 1-2 local songs Since we were still eating at the time and it was raining heavily outside, we stayed in the hall. Next morning while checking out, we found they had charged us Rs 100 extra which was mentioned in a separate slip, not the real bill. We were never informed that there would be charge for it and it was off the books too. If you’ll have my opinion, avoid both these places.
If we had any plans about staying further in that hotel, that put a lid on it. Next morning, we checked out and started our journey towards the living root bridges. The car took us to the starting point to a village from where 3000 steps take you to the first of the living root bridges in Nongriat village which most people visit if short on time. The steps were not exactly even and most of the time too small for me in my hiking boots. Even though we were carrying only small backpacks, the humidity was very tiring and we started getting shaky legs after an hour or so. The first root bridge was near a few houses but off the main path, Though we had seen the pictures and videos of bridges, seeing them for the first time and touching them was an incredible experience. There is a lot of information about these bridges on internet but most miss some small facts like the villagers now use steel wires, bamboo and stones too to make these bridges. We saw 6-7 such bridges and most of them were sturdy, narrow and stable to walk upon.
But the first or maybe 2nd one, was still not ready for use and was off main track. I didn’t realise it then and reached the other side only to see a web of roots in air instead of a way down. There were also some steel rope bridges on the way, but they were quite unsteady. For the floor, there were just 4-5 steel ropes put together with metal straps or wires. In some bridges, the ropes were broken too. The rivers below were swollen and walking on a shaking bridge with a heavy DSLR around the neck was a bit unnerving for the first few steps. But got used to it after some time. From that point onwards, I waited for others to completely cross the bridge before I stepped on to take the pictures. We took one rest stop at a small stall run by a local woman. She was selling local lime juice made from some big green local lime and packaged snacks. I wondered if they could live comfortably even if she managed to sell all her stock in a single day. The whole stuff would have cost just about Rs 250-300 at max. Majority of businesses and shops stay closed on Sundays almost everywhere in Meghalaya. And Sundays in Shillong as well as other smaller places have most number of tourists coming in from neighbouring states.
Guide told us that the water in streams is mostly clear and there are some natural pools too when it’s not raining. But at that time, the rivers were so loud that you couldn’t hear yourself speak standing on the bridges. We reached the famous double decker root bridge area after a while. It is situated in a small village and some people have converted their homes in to guest-house or homestay kind of places.
The guide found one room for us in a guest-house apparently run by some local cooperative society for Rs 400, I think. It was not much, beds were small with thin mattress and not so clean bedsheets, But it was enough for the price and I was not complaining. The view of a sheer rockface with 5 waterfalls in front and the root bridge about a 80-100 meters away was enough for us. The attendant prepared some tea and biscuits for us. There was still some time left for the day and we asked the guide if we could visit Rainbow Falls. He said yes and we left immediately.
We entered the jungle after walking for a few minutes on a small trail. It was raining intermittently since morning and path was slippery with mud and water all over. So we had to be really careful while walking. On the way, we saw numerous types of butterflies spiders, frogs, crabs and other insects. But apart from a giant squirrel, that too when climbing down the stairs, no other animal. On the way, we had to cross a few streams and got our shoes completely wet while crossing one of those. The guide was wearing sandals so it was not a problem for him. But I’d rather wear shoes in a jungle like that. We also crossed 2-3 more steel rope and living root bridges on the way. The trail on the way has a diversion which leads to Cherrapunji, supposedly a 4 hours hike. But our destination, the Rainbow falls took us about 2 hours. We could hear the waterfall long before we reached it. There was a slight drizzle going on at that time and we suddenly broke through the plant cover face to face with waterfall. The main trail ended there about 35-40 meters from the base but there was a treacherous way of going further down for about 20 meters more.
As I climbed down gingerly, the spray from the waterfall grew so strong that I was completely drenched from head to toe in seconds. I had a raincover for the camera, but couldn’t take many pictures due to the amount of water just washing over me. It was hard enough keeping eyes open too. The rainbow waterfall gets it’s name due to the rainbows it forms, not very imaginative. But we didn’t see any rainbow at that time. The water fell on a huge rock on the base from a height of about 15-18 meters There’s another waterfall just above it but was not visible from where we were.
A stream of seemingly clear water was joining the bigger stream and I used it to fill up filter water and clean myself a bit. We started back for guesthouse after 40-45 minutes of enjoying the view. The hike back was uneventful apart from a few near falls due to slippery ground. We were fairly tired and completely drenched from head to toe. Surprisingly the village had electricity supply, but the fans didn’t run very fast. By this time, I had used all the clothes I had brought with me. After this we were supposed to go directly to Shimla for something and I needed to keep atleast one clean pair of clothing for the stay there. But wifey had no such problem as she had packed enough for trip worth 3 weeks instead of 10 days and was pretty happy making fun of me. Thankfully, I found one extra pair of shorts in the bag and that helped a bit. We put our wet clothes to dry out on the plastic chair under the fan but it was not a very hopeful cause.
There was still some minutes of daylight left, so I walked out to explore the village. Most houses were made of bamboo, cane etc and some of concrete. There was no apparent design or pattern and the houses were just scattered all over the hillside. Some one was playing Michael Learns To Rock songs in one of the houses, probably a tourist or maybe a local. We saw only one foreign tourist during our stay there. Though there was one senior government official staying in the same guesthouse as ours. We spent some time talking about each other’s experiences and how he got interested in traveling quite late in his life.
Next morning, we packed up as best we could and started the hike back. We were both wearing water-proof jackets and guide was just carrying an umbrella. By the time we reached back, we were both completely drenched from the sweat while the guide was completely dry. The driver was waiting for us in the parking area at the end of walkway. We paid the guide, thanked him for his help and started back. We had some thoughts about going on to see Seven Sisters Waterfall but we had seen so many already and decided against it. Stayed for a night in Shillong again before catching the flight from Guwahati. Spent the next day and night traveling from there to Shimla but that’s not an interesting enough to write down. So ending this Meghalaya travelogue here. If I have some time, I’ll create an extra post with some more pictures next.
The End.