Mawlynnong

Mawlynnong sits on the southern slope of the East Khasi Hills where the plateau begins its long drop to the Bangladesh plains, a village of roughly a hundred households, betel palms, broom grass and orchids. In 2003 Discover India magazine called it the cleanest village in Asia, and the label stuck; the habit is older, traced by villagers to cholera epidemics in the nineteenth century, when the missionaries who built the Church of the Epiphany in 1902 preached sanitation alongside scripture. What you see now is a Khasi matrilineal community that treats its lanes as an extension of the home: cone-shaped bamboo dustbins on every path, flower borders swept each dawn, plastic banned, a fine for litter and a rota of children who tidy the square before school.

A couple of kilometres away at Riwai a living root bridge of Ficus elastica arches over a stream, far less crowded than Nongriat and reached without a trek; on the far edge of the village a bamboo Sky View tower climbs above the canopy to a horizon of Bangladeshi rice fields, and the Maw Ryngkew Sharatia balancing rock rests on a pebble as it has for centuries. A day here is slow: a homestay breakfast of red tea and rice cakes, the bridge walk, an hour on the tower at sunset, jadoh cooked by the family, and a night so quiet you can hear the plains. Mawlynnong is small, and better for it; stay the night rather than joining the midday coach crowd.