The wettest place on earth

“Anything we need to bring on the trip?” The agent at the tourist board office in Shillong in northeast India looked up from her ledger and smiled. It must have been a familiar question.  “I’d recommend umbrellas,” she said matter-of-factly. 

We had booked a day trip to the must-see destination of Cherrapunjee, an area of scenic waterfalls and caves about a two-hour drive south from Shillong near the border with Bangladesh. At 400 rupees ($6 each) it was a bargain. We could have paid more and hired a car, but we prefer traveling with other people. It was raining hard when we left the hotel. I was thinking that Shillong’s “Scotland of the East” label had as much to do with the weather as with the scenery. Technically, Shillong has a sub-tropical highland climate; in practice, that means that during the monsoon season, it rains most days. And some days it rains most of the day. Not the persistent drizzle I remember from hikes in the Lake District, Pennines and Yorkshire Moors, but a steady downpour.

We were the first to board the 30-seater bus and did not notice that our tickets had seat numbers. Other tourists—mostly from Delhi and Kolkata—got on and chose their places. As the bus filled, new arrivals started demanding their assigned seats. The young tour guide who had shown up late was not having much success mediating the seat disputes. People jammed into the narrow aisle or climbed over seats as everyone moved to their assigned places. Eventually, everyone was seated, if not happily. The seating disputes delayed our departure by almost half an hour, and the guide warned us we would have less time at the still-undisclosed number of stops. I wiped the condensation off the window and peered out into the driving rain, wondering if all the seating fuss was worth it because no one could not see much anyway. As we left the outskirts of Shillong, the mist thickened, further obscuring visibility. The road wound through low, grassy hills, with rice paddies in the valleys and terraced rows of tea plants on the hillsides; in places the hills were gouged open for sand, gravel and rock quarries. We passed small churches, with cemeteries on hilltops. 

Our first stop was at a waterfall. “Just 10 minutes, please” the guide said. Stephanie and I surveyed the mist-filled valley and the treacherous, slippery steps descending to the viewing platform, and decided to have a cup of tea instead. We crossed the road to the small “hotel” and claimed a wooden bench. The guide had ordered his breakfast of eggs and Maggi noodles. The other tourists wandered in later, many of them ordering food. The 10-minute stop lasted almost an hour.

At the next stop—an ecological park where a waterfall begins its deep plunge—the rain had, if anything, intensified. We almost waded out to the viewing terrace, and looked down to see not mist, but clouds, with the occasional glimpse of the green valley below.

Back on the bus, tension was rising. The guide was describing the sights in English, angering two passengers who insisted he speak in Bengali. “It is the official policy to speak in English,” said the guide. Fortunately for him, passengers came to his defense, pointing out that they were Hindi speakers and did not understand Bengali. 

We passed through the small town of Cherrapunjee, a straggle of houses and commercial buildings clinging to the slopes. In the local Khasi language, the settlement was called Sohra; the British called it “Churra,” which may have been how it sounded to them, and eventually it became Cherrapunjee. Today, its main claim to fame is that it is the wettest place in the world, holding the record for the most rainfall in one month (370 inches in July 1861) and in a year (1,042 inches between August 1, 1860, and July 31, 1861). That proved to be too much for even the rain-resistant British administrators, which is why they decamped to the balmier climes of Shillong. Cherrapunjee’s claims are hotly disputed by a nearby Khasi village, Mawsynram, which receives an average of 467 inches a year and got 1,000 inches dumped on it in 1985. “It used to rain every day,” a fellow passenger told me. “Now there are some dry days in December and January. Climate change, I suppose.” Despite all the rain, both places face an acute water shortage and the inhabitants often trek long distances to obtain potable water.

Our next stop, near the rainy village of Mawsynram, was the Mawsmai cave, known for its impressive stalagmites and stalactites. I made it about as far as most of the tourists—the first chamber. The passage ahead was narrow and under several inches of water. My feet were already wet. I figured I’d buy a postcard instead and went back to the bus.   

At the final stop the rain had eased and we looked out towards Nohkalikai Falls, at 1,115 feet (340 meters) the highest plunge waterfall in India, and reportedly the sixth highest in the world. The name in the Khasi language means “jump of Ka Likai." According to legend, a poor woman named Ka Likai struggled to take care of her infant daughter after her husband’s death.  She was forced to re-marry but her jealous new husband killed and cooked up the daughter.  Returning from work as a porter, Ka Likai unknowingly ate the meat and then discovered a severed finger. Distraught, she flung herself over the cliff to her death. 

As usual, mist and clouds blocked the view. Then a breeze moved through the valley, breaking the clouds. And suddenly there it was, the majestic Nohkalikai, plunging into a green pool below. Cameras clicked before the clouds moved in again.

Scotland of the East

“Welcome to the Scotland of the East.” The battered road sign on a hairpin curve on India’s National Highway 40 looked incongruous amid the stands of bamboo and sub-tropical vegetation. For a moment, I wondered if I was hallucinating. The scenery didn’t look any different from that Stephanie and I had seen for the past hour as our shared taxi labored up the twisting highway from the Brahmaputra valley into the Khasi Hills, passing villages that looked much like other villages in northeast India. No medieval castles shrouded in mist. No sweeping views of lochs and glens.  No sheep (only the usual cattle and goats on the road). Not a single sprig of heather. And definitely no kilts. But I wasn’t dreaming. The sign contained the imprimatur of the Meghalaya Tourism Board, so at least someone thought we were in Scotland.

We were on our way to Shillong, the capital of Meghalaya, the small, hilly state sandwiched between western Assam to the north and Bangladesh to the south. The end of the first Anglo-Burmese War in 1826 left the British East India Company in control of Assam and the northeast. The company depended on the river system for transportation, with steamers from Kolkata and other ports carrying troops, supplies, merchants and missionaries up the Brahmaputra. The company’s regional administrator, David Scott, devised a plan to build a road from the plains of Bengal through the hills to the Brahmaputra to provide an alternative route that would not be affected by annual flooding. After a four-year war with the Khasi, the British took control of the hill country south of the Brahmaputra and posted a political agent to the settlement of Cherrapunjee. In 1864, the administration established a hill station at Shillong. A decade later, it became the capital of the province of Assam, and retained its status until 1972 when it became capital of the newly-created state of Meghalaya.

The “Scotland” story goes something like this (there is no official version, so I am taking literary license). Reaching the crest of a hill, the East India Company agents, weary from their journey from the sweltering lowlands, looked out through the drizzle on a landscape of grassy, treeless hills, mountain streams and clear lakes. “Reminds me of Ben Lomond,” said one. “Nay, Speyside,” replied another. Either way, it looked like Scotland, or as close to Scotland as homesick, tired and dehydrated East India Company agents could imagine. History—or at least the Meghalaya Tourist Board road sign—would have been different if those first agents had come from the Lake District, Yorkshire, Northumberland or North Wales.

Whatever the origin of the Scotland label, it stuck. At an elevation of almost 5,000 feet, the hill station of Shillong had a mild climate—cool and rainy in summer, cool and dry in winter—offering welcome relief from the searing temperatures of the lowlands. The British planted pine trees, and built Victorian bungalows, churches, a polo ground and a golf course called Gleneagles. For half a century, Shillong resembled a transplanted British country town. Then India crowded in. Today, Shillong with a population of 150,000 is (by Indian standards) a large town; its suburbs, sprawling across the hills, add another 200,000 to the metropolitan area. Khasis make up most of the population, with other northeastern tribes represented, as well as Assamese, Bengalis and migrants from mainland India.

About half the population of Meghalaya, and two thirds of Shillong, listed themselves as Christian on the 2011 census. Protestant and French Catholic missionaries had followed the colonial administrators into the hill country and found willing converts among the tribal peoples, many of whom mixed Christianity with traditional beliefs. Not surprisingly for the “Scotland of the East,” Presbyterians form the largest denomination; they built sturdy stone and timber churches in Shillong and other towns. Immigrants from Assam and mainland India have recently led to a resurgence of Hinduism with about one in four in Shillong listing Hinduism as their religion.

The Presbyterians win in the numbers game but it’s the Catholics who win the architectural prize for the Cathedral of Mary Help of Christians, situated on a hill a mile south of the center of Shillong. It is the principal place of worship for the Shillong Archdiocese, which has 33 parishes and an estimated 300,000 adherents. The cathedral stands out not only because of its Art Deco style but because of its color—a striking shade of blue, which also brands the schools, social service centers and shrine around the cathedral—and its foundation. Or rather, lack of foundation. Because the Shillong region is prone to earthquakes, the church was built on trenches filled with sand and has no direct connection with the rock. Theoretically, during an earthquake, the building can shift safely on the shock-absorbing sand.

We visited the cathedral with Ratul Baruah, the news editor of the English-language Meghalaya Guardian, whom I had met on the flight from Delhi to Guwahati. With its high arches and long stained-glass windows, the cathedral has been described as modern Gothic. By Catholic standards, its interior seemed uncluttered, with just a few large paintings and banners.  The banners, explained Ratul, were in the Khasi language, indicating how the missionaries had adapted their religion to local sensibilities.

After the visit, Ratul took us for lunch at a restaurant owned by his friend, Raphael, an artist and local TV station owner. We talked about the vibrant local media scene; in addition to Ratul’s newspaper, three other English-language weeklies and newspapers in indigenous languages—Khasi, Jaintia and Garo—circulate in Meghalaya. I told Raphael I was curious about his name. “Well, I have a Khasi name,” he told me, “but my family is Catholic, so my mother had to give me a Christian name. Don’t you think Raphael is a pretty good name for an artist?”