Places

Mawphlang sacred groveNatureEast Khasi Hills

A dense, mossy, closed-canopy forest kept intact for centuries by the Lyngdoh clan of Hima Mawphlang under a prohibition on removing anything from it — no firewood, no fruit, in the strict account not even a dead leaf carried out. The result is a standing control sample of what the plateau looked like before the grass hills were made, ringed by open monolith fields where the sacrifices were performed. It is protected by taboo and community sanction rather than by forest law, and there are over a hundred such groves across the hills.

Best time: October–April.

Nongriat double-decker root bridgeHeritageEast Khasi Hills

Two jingkieng jri stacked one above the other across the same stream below Sohra, reached by a descent of roughly three thousand steps from Tyrna. The stacking is functional — the lower deck is unusable when the stream is in spate, so a second was grown above it. Bridges like these take fifteen to thirty years to become load-bearing and then last for generations, which makes them the opposite investment from a built bridge.

Best time: October–March. Getting there: Road from Sohra to Tyrna, then a steep stepped descent of about two hours each way.

MawlynnongHeritageEast Khasi Hills

A War Khasi village on the southern slope with its own root bridge at nearby Riwai, known nationally after a travel magazine described it as Asia's cleanest village in the early 2000s — a claim that is a media artefact rather than a survey result, but which reflects a real and organised village practice of communal cleaning directed by the dorbar.

Sohra (Cherrapunji) and Nohkalikai FallsNatureEast Khasi Hills

The rim town that gave its name to the rainfall record, and the waterfall that drops off the escarpment beside it in a single plunge of over three hundred metres into a green pool. Sohra's tableland is bare and lateritic — a reminder that extreme rainfall on a deforested sandstone cap strips soil rather than building it.

Best time: October–March for views; June–August to understand the place.

Mawsynram and Mawjymbuin caveNatureEast Khasi Hills

The village that holds the highest recorded annual average rainfall of any inhabited place, and a limestone cave above it in which a stalagmite has weathered into a form worshipped as a Shiva lingam. The two facts sit a few hundred metres apart and are visited together.

Nartiang monolithsHeritageWest Jaintia Hills

The largest single concentration of standing stones in the hills — upright maw shynrang and flat maw kynthei in a grove at Nartiang, raised between roughly 1500 and 1835 by clans of the village and by lieutenants of the Jaintia rulers, including U Mar Phalyngki, to whom the tallest is attributed. They are memorials and markers of events rather than tombs, and they are the physical record of a society that did not write.

Best time: October–April.

Nartiang Durga templePilgrimageWest Jaintia Hills

A Durga temple of long standing at Nartiang, maintained by a Brahmin priestly line and counted locally among the shakti peethas. It stands a short walk from the monolith field, and the two together show the Jaintia court's absorption of plains Hindu practice alongside indigenous rite.

Krem Liat Prah and the Shnongrim ridge cavesNatureEast Jaintia Hills

At around thirty-four kilometres of surveyed passage, Krem Liat Prah is the longest cave in South Asia, and it is one of roughly a hundred and fifty known caves in the same limestone ridge. Its main trunk passage is large enough to have been named the Aircraft Hangar. The surveyed length keeps rising as adjacent systems are connected.

Mawsmai and Arwah cavesNatureEast Khasi Hills

The two lit and walkable limestone caves near Sohra, the second with visible fossils in its walls — the accessible end of a cave landscape that otherwise requires rope.

Dawki and the Umngot riverNatureWest Jaintia Hills

The river that runs off the escarpment onto the plain, so clear in the dry months that boats appear suspended above the bed. It is also the working land crossing to Bangladesh, and the point where the hill economy and the plain economy physically meet.

Best time: November–March, when the water clears.

Umiam Lake (Barapani)NatureRi Bhoi

A reservoir created by damming the Umiam in 1965 for the region's first large hydro scheme, now the standing view on the road up from the plains to Shillong.

Ïewduh (Bara Bazar), ShillongUrbanEast Khasi Hills

One of the largest traditional markets in the Northeast, and overwhelmingly run by women — vegetables, betel, dried fish, meat, cloth and cane goods across a warren of lanes. The Khasi week traditionally ran to eight days and was named around the market cycle, which tells you where the market sat in the calendar.

SmitHeritageEast Khasi Hills

The ceremonial seat of Hima Khyrim, with the Iing Sad — the thatched ancestral house where the Nongkrem dance is held each November. Quiet for the rest of the year, and worth seeing empty.

Laitlum CanyonsNatureEast Khasi Hills

A grassland edge where the plateau falls away into a set of deep valleys, with a stepped footpath descending to Rasong village — the clearest single view of how abruptly this landscape ends.

KongthongHeritageEast Khasi Hills

The village where each person's name is a tune whistled by their mother at birth. It was India's nomination to the UN World Tourism Organization's best-village programme in 2021, and the practice survives among only a few hundred people.

Thadlaskein lake and JowaiHeritageWest Jaintia Hills

Jowai is the Pnar town where Behdienkhlam is held; Thadlaskein, nearby, is a man-made tank attached in local account to a sixteenth-century Jaintia general and his followers, who are said to have dug it with the ends of their bows.