Cherrapunji (Sohra)

For most of the twentieth century Cherrapunji was the wettest place on earth, averaging over 11,000 millimetres of rain a year; the record set in 1861, more than 26 metres in twelve months, still stands. The British made it the first headquarters of their Khasi Hills administration in the 1830s before retreating to Shillong, and the Khasi call it Sohra, seat of an old hima chieftainship whose monoliths still stand on the plateau. The land is a table of limestone and sandstone that ends abruptly in a 1,000-metre escarpment above the Bangladesh plains, and the monsoon that rises from those plains falls off the edge again as waterfalls: Nohkalikai, India's tallest plunge at 340 metres, named for a Khasi mother of a terrible legend; the seven ribbons of Nohsngithiang; Dainthlen with its carved stone of the slain serpent.

Beneath the plateau lie the Mawsmai and Arwah caves, and in the gorges below Tyrna grow the Khasi's living root bridges, coaxed over decades from the roots of Ficus elastica, the most famous a double-decker at Nongriat reached by some 3,500 stone steps. A day here is mist rolling over the Eco Park cliffs, a descent into steamy green where butterflies cross the trail, a swim beneath Rainbow Falls, and a night in a village where the only sound is water. Come in the dry months for the bridges and in monsoon for the sound of the falls; either way Sohra rearranges what you think rain is.