Nohkalikai Falls and Living Root Bridges

A couple weekends ago I visited Cherrapunji/Sohra with my Australian linguist friends, which is the first place foreigners entered Meghalaya. We had heard there were quite a few sights to see, and were not disappointed. Cherrapunji is a beautiful place if you manage to be there when it's not raining (this area is the rainiest spot on earth, due to the high mountains that drop severely to Bangladesh on the south). And we managed.

We took a nice hike to Nohkalikai falls, which is named after a lady who jumped from the top. The story is that kong Likai fell in love and got married to a young man from her village. They were very happy and had a child. Soon after the child's birth the husband died. Ka Likai was having difficulty providing for the family and remarried. The new couple were still very poor, and the new husband started to dislike his stepchild. One day when Likai was out of the house he killed the child and used it as meat for a meal. When Likai returned home she found dinner prepared, and though she wondered where her child was, her husband assured her that the child was only playing, and as she was hungry he convinced her to eat. As soon as she had eaten a piece of meat, she knew it was her own child that she had eaten, and full of remorse she ran to the waterfall and jumped off.

The waterfall itself is quite beautiful, though the story is rather sad. The next day we trekked down over 2,000 stairs (and back up in the afternoon) to get to a number of living root bridges that local farmers have trained slowly over the last 150 years. Apparently this kind of bridge is quite common in the War-speaking areas in the mountains at the border of Bangladesh. According to this blog, they are not common anywhere else. Here's some video: http://youtu.be/TXml5M2jkQc

Nartiang Monoliths

Last week my friend Ruhi took me along with some other friends to Nartiang, which was once the summer capital of the Jaintia kings, who ruled most of this area from the 1500's until they were deposed by the British East India Trading Company in the late 1800s. When the power shifted, trade shifted as well, so that the once-prosperous town of Nartiang is a quiet backwater.

However, it still boasts the finest collection of monoliths in the area, on a special site where the king's soldiers gathered and erected large stones and set huge flat slabs on smaller rocks to create stalls where people could display their goods and elders could gather for meetings. It was quite an incredible experience. From pictures I had seen the stones looked rather small, but once there for myself I could see that it was more like a giant's playground. Just to give you an idea of the scale, here I am standing on a huge rock slab next to one of the stones. If you come to northeast India, this is one sight you won't want to miss.

Below is some video from our visit: http://youtu.be/YDk-IwlIwfU