In Press

We are glad that our resort and Cherrapunjee has had a special mention on international and local media. This place has inspired many a traveler down the ages. We invite you to browse through the links below and get inspired to visit this bountiful part of the globe.

International Press:

The Guardian, UK
  • In Meghalaya, north-east India, women own the land, Christianity dominates and the landscape is straight out of The Hobbit. Our writer visits a most unusual state (click to read more)
  • Meghalaya in north-east India is a little-visted, but fascinating corner of the country. This gallery of images takes you from the extraordinary living tree bridges of the valleys to market day in Cherrapunjee, the wettest place in the world (click to read more)
The Telegraph, UK
  • There are a handful of underwater hotels, including the rather budget looking Jules Undersea Lodge in Florida, the equally spartan Utter Inn, which is found three metres below the surface of a Swedish lake, and the Rangali Island Resort in the Maldives, which has an underwater suite and restaurant. Or else take a summer holiday in the Indian town of Cherrapunji. It receives 11.4 metres of rain during a typical year, the vast majority of which falls between April and September. In 1861, 23 metres of rain fell here. (click to read more)
Wall Street Journal
  • Irene, Katrina, Rita, Wilma, Alpha, Beta: This year, for the first time, meteorologists used up all 21 preapproved names for hurricanes and had to default to the Greek alphabet. In August, 20 feet of water swamped sections of New Orleans, while 1,000 miles north, (click to read more)
Huffington Post
  • India’s northeastern state of Meghalaya (“Abode of the Clouds”) is breathtaking with its tropical forests, lush green mountains and fluffy, white clouds. Unique to this wet and remote area are spectacular living root bridges. (click to read more)
Reader's Digest
  • For me, Monsoon is the most romantic season: dark clouds adding drama to the skies, air fragrant with the unmatched scent of wet earth, getting drenched in the rains or huddling together under an umbrella. Yep, the monsoon makes everything greener and gorgeous. Some places, however, are more beautiful than others during this season and make for great holiday options. (click to read more)
  • In ‘the land of oranges’ in ‘the abode of clouds,’ a gentle people inhabiting one of the rainiest places on earth make use of living bridges fashioned from tree roots to cross surging rivers. If this sounds like something out of a fairy tale, think again, as truth is sometimes stranger than fiction in India.
    Cherrapunjee, translating to ‘the land of oranges,’ is a sprawling, sparsely populated town in India’s North East state of Meghalaya (or ‘abode of clouds’) and home to over 10,000 Khasi people. The Khasi, a tribal Mon-Khmer group originating from Southeast Asia are one of the last true matrilineal and matrilocal societies where families inherit the wife’s surname and live with the female’s family. (click to read more)
The Independent, UK
  • I was in the wettest place on earth: Cherrapunjee, a region in the verdant, little-visited north-eastern Indian state of Meghalaya. Now, though, the skies were a clear, brilliant blue. I’d come to trek to Cherrapunjee’s mysterious living-root bridges. These structures are as much works of art as examples of environmentally friendly bio-engineering. (click to read more)
Atlas Obscura
  • In the depths of northeastern India, within sight of the India-Bangladesh border, in one of the wettest places on earth, bridges aren’t built—they’re grown. (click to read more)
The National, UAE
  • Besides being the wettest place on earth, Cherrapunji in India’s north-east is home to a series of unique bridges, strange tapestries of live tree roots woven by indigenous tribes. Jini Reddy explores these marvels of bioengineering. (click to read more)

National Press:

Conde Nast Traveller
  • Stay with an Apatani family and learn about their traditional farming practices at this 25-acre organic farmstay in Ziro. The owners grow fruit and vegetables including tomatoes, kiwi and rice. You could spend your day helping the family on the farm or in the kitchen garden, where chillies, lettuce and corn take root. The rooms here are spotless and very comfortable, if a bit small. But you’ll be outside most of the time anyway. (click to read more)
Indian Express
  • Going by conservative estimates, Cherrapunjee gets around 800 visitors every weekend who get there early morning from Shillong or Guwahati and return before early afternoon, and about 150 visitors a week who stay overnight. (click to read more)
Outlook Traveler
  • On the subject of entrancing places, M.M. Kaye talks of names “that possess a peculiar, singing magic in every syllable; like Samarkand or Rajasthan, or Kilimanjaro…” In that list she should include Meghalaya, the ‘Abode of Clouds’. Round the vowels a touch full, stretch the ‘a’ that links ‘megh’ and ‘aalaya’…The name presages dream-like vistas — a magical land with its head perpetually in the clouds. (click to read more)
Business Traveler India
  • The contender for the wettest place on earth is a region carved out of the rain. Cherrapunjee in Meghalaya is a repository of hidden facets, finds Deepika Belapurkar

    The Guwahati travel agent’s voice crackled with disbelief, when we asked him to add Cherrapunjee to our itinerary. He tried his utmost to pack us off to Majuli, then Khajiranga and finally in desperation Tawang. “Why Sohra (as the khasis call Cherrapunjee)?” he inquired with a trace of vexation. He was so sure that Cherrapunjee would lower us into the depths of despair by the time we were through. (click to read more)

Books:

Books
  • It is the subject of countless poems and paintings; the top of the weather report; the source of all the world’s water. Yet this is the first book to tell the story of rain.

    Cynthia Barnett’s Rain begins four billion years ago with the torrents that filled the oceans, and builds to the storms of climate change. It weaves together science – the true shape of a raindrop, the mysteries of frog and fish rains – with the human story of our ambition to control rain, from ancient rain dances to the 2,203 miles of levees that attempt to straitjacket the Mississippi River. It offers a glimpse of our “founding forecaster,” Thomas Jefferson, who measured every drizzle long before modern meteorology. Two centuries later, rainy skies would help inspire Morrissey’s mopes and Kurt Cobain’s grunge. Rain is also a travelogue, taking readers to Scotland to tell the surprising story of the mackintosh raincoat, and to India, where villagers extract the scent of rain from the monsoon-drenched earth and turn it into perfume. (click to read more)

  • It is rain that has made Cherrapunji a globally renowned villageand so Binoo K. John undertakes a tumultuous journey to unravel the mystery of the geographical quirk that brings to Cherra and the nearby…(click to read more)
  • The living bridges of Cherrapunji, India are made from the roots of the Ficus elastica tree. This tree produces a series of secondary roots from higher up its trunk and can comfortably perch atop huge boulders along the riverbanks, or even in the middle of the rivers themselves. (click to read more)

Blogs:

Traveltocare.com
  • Cherrapunjee Holiday Resort is a remote, rustic resort nestled on an enormous hill at the very edge of southern Meghalaya, within spitting distance of Bangladesh and surrounded by stunning views on all sides. The heart and soul of the place is Denis, a former bank manager turned vehement eco-tourism advocate. He and his lovely Khasi wife Carmela have laboured for the last eight years to attract tourists to Cherrapunjee and infuse the spirit of eco-tourism into the local community.(click to read more)
Redscarab
  • At Shillong, the air was crisp and cold with rock music riding the wind, wafting out of street cafés and mobile phones. The 3½ hour drive from the plains of Guwahati to the mountainous expanse of Meghalaya was mesmerizing. Every so often, we’d stop to click old churches, charming colonial bungalows and women in traditional jainsen and blouses. Near the Polo Ground we watched men wager at the age-old game of teer (archery) before digging into delicious Khasi cuisine of jadoh (red rice) and pork in Trattoria, a local joint. (click to read more)
Ticks Fleas & Leeches
  • A slightly modified version of this article was first published in Saevus magazine in April 2014. It expresses my views on water scarcity in ‘Cherrapunji-the wettest place on Earth’, which took me by surprise. (click to read more)
Final Transit
  • “Khublei”, we greeted a Khasi villager, enquiring about directions to a living bridge hidden deep within the hills of Meghalaya, a small state whose name means “Abode of the Clouds” in north east India bordering Bangladesh. We were navigating a network of trails through thick subtropical rainforests, trying to reach one of the ingenious creations of the local tribe that helped them deal with perennial rains: a suspension bridge hand made by training the aerial roots of a living rubber fig tree… (click to read more)
Manuscrypts
  • Contd from Day 1, Day 2…. Cherrapunjee had decided to show us why it deserved the ‘wettest place on earth’ tag. Being from Kerala, we were not really wet behind our ears when it came to heavy rains. But this was something else! Many times we saw the sky clear up, but it was like […] (click to read more)