I left Silchar by sumo at 8:30 on the morning of the 18th, bound for Shillong, about 150 miles northwest in the hills of Meghalaya state. The ride was uncomfortable. I didn't have much leg room in the back seat of the sumo, which was hard on my knees, the driving was bad, and it was difficult to see out the windows. We crossed a wide river in the Assam flatlands and continued through flatlands until reaching the hills of Meghalaya. The climb was somewhat scenic, though my view was poor, but we soon reached a rather ugly plateau. We passed quite a few small piles of coal along the road and some big coal mines with tall buildings.
We stopped for an hour lunch stop at 1. A friendly Jaintia woman asked me, "Christian? Bible?" Meghalaya is a hilly state, rising up to about 6500 feet just north of Bangladesh. It separated from Assam in 1972 and has a population composed of three main hill tribes, or ethnicities: the Jaintia in the east, the Khasi in the center, and the Garo in the west. They use the Roman alphabet and are mostly Christian.
We reached pines at about 4000 feet under now cloudy skies and reached the ugly sprawl of Shillong about 4. The sumo was heading to Guwahati in Assam and almost forgot to drop me off. It dropped me far from the center, with rain starting just as I was dropped off. Fortunately, I found a taxi to take me to the center, where I checked into a small wooden hotel dating from 1920 near the center. The center is modern but run down, with a pedestrian mall often full of people and commercial malls with electronic and clothes stores, KFC, Subway, Baskin Robbins, and the like. Under cloudy skies with some rain and at about 5000 feet elevation, it was chilly in town. Shillong is the capital of Meghalaya and had been the capital of Assam, as the British much preferred the cool of the hills to the hot lowlands.
My hotel room was cold at night and early in the morning, my thermometer registering 61 degrees the next morning at about 6:30. Under a blue sky I walked to Bara Bazaar, the city's open market, and back. It is said Shillong used to be a lovely hill station, but now it is overbuilt and mostly ugly. I ate breakfast and then walked to an area with vestiges of colonial Shillong, with some cottages under pines around Ward's Lake and the nearby colonial era Pinewood Hotel. I also saw a colonial era Presbyterian church and the Shillong Club. After lunch I tried unsuccessfully to find the Arunachal Pradesh office to ask about permits.
About 3 I walked north to the river, passing a few colonial era buildings of timber and plaster, and then took a shared taxi to the site of the Siat Khnam held every afternoon. Siat Khnam is a local sport where men shoot arrows at a target. It is the basis of a betting regime with betting shops all over the city. I passed the 15 or so betting booths and food stalls at the site of the Siat Khnam itself and watched Khasi men, young and old, talking and preparing their arrows. The arrows are made of bamboo with a metal point, and the bows may be made of bamboo, too.
At 4 about 40 men began shooting arrows at the cylindrical target, about four feet high, maybe one foot wide, and made of some sort of dry reeds bound together. A flurry of arrows flew towards the target, many sticking in it. This lasted for about five minutes, until a cloth curtain was pulled in front of the target. Then a separate group of about five men approached the target, pulled out all the arrows and carefully counted them. Each man counted the arrows in groups of ten, with each group of ten placed in a separate slot in a wooden rack. More than 200 arrows had hit the target, maybe something like 230. The bettors at the site and all over town bet on the last two digits of the number of arrows lodged in the target, so that if 234 arrows are in the target, the winning number is 34. It is more like a lottery than a sport, but fun to watch.
Two shooting sessions are held each afternoon. During the interim some of the younger archers practiced shooting at a fibrous target about the size of a beer can while most of the archers relaxed and counted their arrows. Each archer appears to have marked arrows so he can identify them. About 5 the second round was held, much the same as the first. After it was all over, I took a taxi back and ate dinner at the colonial Pinewood Hotel. The Chicken Kiev was okay, but the vegetables were cold.
The temperature in my room was 59 degrees at 7 the next morning. I later saw a local newspaper that said lows at night in Shillong were in the low 50's. I read for a while in my cold room and then outside, warmer than my room, in the sun. After breakfast I walked along the busy pedestrian mall in the town center. Indian people far outnumber the local Khasi people, though I did see some traditionally dressed Khasi women in their distinctive clothes. The women like plaid. I stopped to listen to a young Romanian woman playing her violin. She attracted a huge crowd, and eventually soldiers politely asked her to stop because the crowd was blocking the mall. She was very good. She told me she helps finance her travels by donations.
After lunch I made my way to the Don Bosco Museum of Indigenous Cultures, quite a way from the center. I spent about four hours there. It had artifacts and some great photos, some of the most interesting from 50 or 60 years ago, showing how the hill tribe people lived. There are also exhibits on the history of Christianity and on Don Bosco, a 19th century Italian priest and educator.
The sky was hazy the next morning, which was unfortunate as that day I was taking a tour south to Cherrapungee and the sites near it, about 30 miles from Shillong and just a few miles from the border with Bangladesh. The group was all Indian but me. I was planing to stay the night in Cherrapungee and thought I could use the tour to get me there and see some of the sights nearby, which can be hard to get to without your own transport.
Cherrapungee is famous as one of the rainiest places on earth. In fact, it claims to be the rainiest, though I have heard the same claim for other places, like Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands and Pohnpei in the Caroline Islands. A big difference is that the high rainfall in Kauai and Pohnpei is at uninhabited center of the islands, while Cherrapungee is inhabited. It gets very heavy rain when the monsoon sweeps over flat Bangladesh and crashes into the hills of Meghalaya. On one day in 1876 an incredible 41 inches of rainfall were recorded at Cherrapungee. Almost three and a half feet in one day!
Leaving Shillong, our bus passed big military camps on the outskirts and headed south. As we neared Cherrapungee I was surprised how dry it was, a rocky and grassy, mostly treeless plateau. The grass was dry and yellow, not green. After a slow hour drive south from Shillong we stopped for a hazy view down a tree-filled deep valley to the east. Another hour took us to the spread out small town of Cherrapungee, also called Sohra, at about 4500 feet elevation. We drove beyond it to a now dry waterfall which must be spectacular during the monsoon, and then to the nearby Mawsmai Cave, lighted within and about 500 feet long. After walking through the cave, we drove a little further south, descending to about 2500 feet elevation for very hazy views of the Bangladesh plains, and then to another viewpoint about 250 feet higher for more hazy views of cliffs above the flat terrain to the south.. The views must be much better without hazy skies.
We drove back to Cherrapungee/Sohra to the Ramakrishna Mission, with an old fashioned but good museum. It had rainfall figures for Cherrapungee. From 1973 to 2012 rainfall averaged 470 inches a year. In 1974 it totaled an incredible 967 inches. And even more amazing is that on average almost half of the rain (47%) falls in the two months of June and July, while almost all of it (98%) falls from May to October, during the monsoon. Average rainfall in June is 122 inches, in July 98 inches.
From Sohra we drove about three miles out of town to the top of a cliff with forest far below. Over the cliff plunges Nohkalikai Falls, which also must be spectacular in the monsoon. Just a trickle could be seen that day. We ate lunch in a small cliffside restaurant and then at about 3 the bus dropped me off in Sohra before heading back to Shillong.
On a level sandy spot below the town center, and on the edge of a ravine with massive cliffs beyond, a big group of Khasi dancers, about 50 of them, were performing. I intended to head right away to a guest house two or three miles from town, but instead spent two and a half hours watching the dancers. Terraced benches stood on one side of the sandy dance ground and I seemed to be the only foreigner among the Khasi spectators.
Everything was very colorful. The dancers ranged in age from little kids, maybe as young as five, to young men and women, at most in their 20's. Women and girls wore long, very tight yellow skirts, silver crowns with plastic flowers, and heavy necklaces. Men and boys wore white dhotis with silver quivers and arrows on their backs and long feathers on their heads. They had some red in their costumes, too, while the women had blouses of various colors. The women and girls, in their tight skirts, danced very slowly, barely moving their feet and without any expression on their faces whatsoever. They danced shoulder to shoulder in small groups of maybe two to five or so. The men and boys danced much more actively, sweeping back and forth, in groups of maybe five to eight. The males and females danced around each other, not with each other. It was all very interesting.
The spectators were very friendly. One old man told me about the Khasi and about the necklaces the women and girls were wearing. The big smooth orangish-pink orbs are coral, he told me, each coral piece worth maybe 50,000 rupees, almost $800. An entire necklace might be worth six lakh, or 600,000, rupees, almost $10,000, he said. He told me he had six necklaces. He pointed out the imitation coral on some necklaces, clearly distinguishable.
The dances came to a conclusion for the day, with the big day of dances to be the next day. It all appeared to be part of a town festival. In fact, a rock band was setting up nearby to play that night. It was chilly by the end of the afternoon as I took a shared taxi down the road two or three miles to the little lodge where I planned to stay. I got a room shared with a friendly Indian guy from Hyderabad, Nitin, who had just graduated from college and was traveling a bit before heading to the United States to get a masters degree in mechanical engineering. The lodge was run by a friendly Khasi guy with dreadlocks who played a guitar in his small reception room.
I was up about 7:30 the next morning and walked up to the dance ground and back until about 11. The area was rocky and grassy, with yellow grass. You wouldn't have thought it is the rainiest place on earth. I passed houses and several church buildings, including a modern Presbyterian church. The church was established here by Welsh missionaries led by Thomas Jones in 1841. I walked up to a rocky, grassy hilltop cemetery, with yellow grass growing all over and among the broken headstones. Most were only 20 or 30 years old, but there was a memorial to a pastor who died in 1908 and to Mrs. Jones who died in 1846 or so.
Few cars passed on the road, though I did see a few Nanos, the very tiny Indian made cars that originally were produced to sell for one lakh, or 100,000, rupees, only a little more than $2000 at the time. They now sell for more and haven't proven to be very popular. I think I saw more in the Cherrapungee area than in all the rest of India. Few people were out, either, early on a Sunday morning. The kids I did encounter were friendly. I stopped at some megaliths and a cremation platform for Cherrapungee kings.
Nearing the dance ground, I found a path heading into trees and leading to the cliff edge, with great views down into the deep canyon and over to the impressive cliffs on the other side, the ones I had seen the afternoon before from the dance ground. I walked as far as the dance ground, decorated with banners and flags for the festival, and then turned back. On the way back I was surprised to see the Presbyterian church empty on this Sunday morning, but I did come across an outdoor service of the Full Gospel Church, with a preacher and guitar players up on a stage. The sun was out and some of the congregation sheltered under umbrellas.
I had breakfast after 11 and then talked for a while to the dreadlocked manager of the lodge. He told me the present king lives in what he called Upper Sohra, where the market and bus stand are, above the dance ground. He said the dance was a cultivation dance. I asked about the two names -- Cherrapungee and Sohra -- and he told me that perhaps outsiders heard "Sohra" as "Cherra," and that "pungee" means "village" in Bengali.
I ate lunch about 1:30 and then took a shared taxi up to the dance ground about 2:30. The dancing had started and lasted until 5:30. A big crowd had gathered, almost all Khasi, though I did see a few outsiders, both Indian and western. Eventually, there must have been 200 or so dancers, all very colorfully arrayed. I sat next to a friendly older woman who had two brothers dancing. She told me the slow moving female dancers, moving only their feet, must be virgins, and dance in the center to be protected by the males. Most of the females have hair reaching down to their waists. She told me they wear false hair. They all wore very red lipstick, too.
Some of the men occasionally danced with swords, twirling them. I saw eight of them together do such a dance. The crowd was friendly and enjoying the spectacle. Often a little boy or girl, or an older one, would come up to his or her mother in the audience for some costume adjustment. One chubby little boy, maybe about 8, particularly seemed to be enjoying himself. The dancing had no big climax. It just petered out, and I took a shared taxi back to the lodge.
We stopped for an hour lunch stop at 1. A friendly Jaintia woman asked me, "Christian? Bible?" Meghalaya is a hilly state, rising up to about 6500 feet just north of Bangladesh. It separated from Assam in 1972 and has a population composed of three main hill tribes, or ethnicities: the Jaintia in the east, the Khasi in the center, and the Garo in the west. They use the Roman alphabet and are mostly Christian.
We reached pines at about 4000 feet under now cloudy skies and reached the ugly sprawl of Shillong about 4. The sumo was heading to Guwahati in Assam and almost forgot to drop me off. It dropped me far from the center, with rain starting just as I was dropped off. Fortunately, I found a taxi to take me to the center, where I checked into a small wooden hotel dating from 1920 near the center. The center is modern but run down, with a pedestrian mall often full of people and commercial malls with electronic and clothes stores, KFC, Subway, Baskin Robbins, and the like. Under cloudy skies with some rain and at about 5000 feet elevation, it was chilly in town. Shillong is the capital of Meghalaya and had been the capital of Assam, as the British much preferred the cool of the hills to the hot lowlands.
My hotel room was cold at night and early in the morning, my thermometer registering 61 degrees the next morning at about 6:30. Under a blue sky I walked to Bara Bazaar, the city's open market, and back. It is said Shillong used to be a lovely hill station, but now it is overbuilt and mostly ugly. I ate breakfast and then walked to an area with vestiges of colonial Shillong, with some cottages under pines around Ward's Lake and the nearby colonial era Pinewood Hotel. I also saw a colonial era Presbyterian church and the Shillong Club. After lunch I tried unsuccessfully to find the Arunachal Pradesh office to ask about permits.
About 3 I walked north to the river, passing a few colonial era buildings of timber and plaster, and then took a shared taxi to the site of the Siat Khnam held every afternoon. Siat Khnam is a local sport where men shoot arrows at a target. It is the basis of a betting regime with betting shops all over the city. I passed the 15 or so betting booths and food stalls at the site of the Siat Khnam itself and watched Khasi men, young and old, talking and preparing their arrows. The arrows are made of bamboo with a metal point, and the bows may be made of bamboo, too.
At 4 about 40 men began shooting arrows at the cylindrical target, about four feet high, maybe one foot wide, and made of some sort of dry reeds bound together. A flurry of arrows flew towards the target, many sticking in it. This lasted for about five minutes, until a cloth curtain was pulled in front of the target. Then a separate group of about five men approached the target, pulled out all the arrows and carefully counted them. Each man counted the arrows in groups of ten, with each group of ten placed in a separate slot in a wooden rack. More than 200 arrows had hit the target, maybe something like 230. The bettors at the site and all over town bet on the last two digits of the number of arrows lodged in the target, so that if 234 arrows are in the target, the winning number is 34. It is more like a lottery than a sport, but fun to watch.
Two shooting sessions are held each afternoon. During the interim some of the younger archers practiced shooting at a fibrous target about the size of a beer can while most of the archers relaxed and counted their arrows. Each archer appears to have marked arrows so he can identify them. About 5 the second round was held, much the same as the first. After it was all over, I took a taxi back and ate dinner at the colonial Pinewood Hotel. The Chicken Kiev was okay, but the vegetables were cold.
The temperature in my room was 59 degrees at 7 the next morning. I later saw a local newspaper that said lows at night in Shillong were in the low 50's. I read for a while in my cold room and then outside, warmer than my room, in the sun. After breakfast I walked along the busy pedestrian mall in the town center. Indian people far outnumber the local Khasi people, though I did see some traditionally dressed Khasi women in their distinctive clothes. The women like plaid. I stopped to listen to a young Romanian woman playing her violin. She attracted a huge crowd, and eventually soldiers politely asked her to stop because the crowd was blocking the mall. She was very good. She told me she helps finance her travels by donations.
After lunch I made my way to the Don Bosco Museum of Indigenous Cultures, quite a way from the center. I spent about four hours there. It had artifacts and some great photos, some of the most interesting from 50 or 60 years ago, showing how the hill tribe people lived. There are also exhibits on the history of Christianity and on Don Bosco, a 19th century Italian priest and educator.
The sky was hazy the next morning, which was unfortunate as that day I was taking a tour south to Cherrapungee and the sites near it, about 30 miles from Shillong and just a few miles from the border with Bangladesh. The group was all Indian but me. I was planing to stay the night in Cherrapungee and thought I could use the tour to get me there and see some of the sights nearby, which can be hard to get to without your own transport.
Cherrapungee is famous as one of the rainiest places on earth. In fact, it claims to be the rainiest, though I have heard the same claim for other places, like Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands and Pohnpei in the Caroline Islands. A big difference is that the high rainfall in Kauai and Pohnpei is at uninhabited center of the islands, while Cherrapungee is inhabited. It gets very heavy rain when the monsoon sweeps over flat Bangladesh and crashes into the hills of Meghalaya. On one day in 1876 an incredible 41 inches of rainfall were recorded at Cherrapungee. Almost three and a half feet in one day!
Leaving Shillong, our bus passed big military camps on the outskirts and headed south. As we neared Cherrapungee I was surprised how dry it was, a rocky and grassy, mostly treeless plateau. The grass was dry and yellow, not green. After a slow hour drive south from Shillong we stopped for a hazy view down a tree-filled deep valley to the east. Another hour took us to the spread out small town of Cherrapungee, also called Sohra, at about 4500 feet elevation. We drove beyond it to a now dry waterfall which must be spectacular during the monsoon, and then to the nearby Mawsmai Cave, lighted within and about 500 feet long. After walking through the cave, we drove a little further south, descending to about 2500 feet elevation for very hazy views of the Bangladesh plains, and then to another viewpoint about 250 feet higher for more hazy views of cliffs above the flat terrain to the south.. The views must be much better without hazy skies.
We drove back to Cherrapungee/Sohra to the Ramakrishna Mission, with an old fashioned but good museum. It had rainfall figures for Cherrapungee. From 1973 to 2012 rainfall averaged 470 inches a year. In 1974 it totaled an incredible 967 inches. And even more amazing is that on average almost half of the rain (47%) falls in the two months of June and July, while almost all of it (98%) falls from May to October, during the monsoon. Average rainfall in June is 122 inches, in July 98 inches.
From Sohra we drove about three miles out of town to the top of a cliff with forest far below. Over the cliff plunges Nohkalikai Falls, which also must be spectacular in the monsoon. Just a trickle could be seen that day. We ate lunch in a small cliffside restaurant and then at about 3 the bus dropped me off in Sohra before heading back to Shillong.
On a level sandy spot below the town center, and on the edge of a ravine with massive cliffs beyond, a big group of Khasi dancers, about 50 of them, were performing. I intended to head right away to a guest house two or three miles from town, but instead spent two and a half hours watching the dancers. Terraced benches stood on one side of the sandy dance ground and I seemed to be the only foreigner among the Khasi spectators.
Everything was very colorful. The dancers ranged in age from little kids, maybe as young as five, to young men and women, at most in their 20's. Women and girls wore long, very tight yellow skirts, silver crowns with plastic flowers, and heavy necklaces. Men and boys wore white dhotis with silver quivers and arrows on their backs and long feathers on their heads. They had some red in their costumes, too, while the women had blouses of various colors. The women and girls, in their tight skirts, danced very slowly, barely moving their feet and without any expression on their faces whatsoever. They danced shoulder to shoulder in small groups of maybe two to five or so. The men and boys danced much more actively, sweeping back and forth, in groups of maybe five to eight. The males and females danced around each other, not with each other. It was all very interesting.
The spectators were very friendly. One old man told me about the Khasi and about the necklaces the women and girls were wearing. The big smooth orangish-pink orbs are coral, he told me, each coral piece worth maybe 50,000 rupees, almost $800. An entire necklace might be worth six lakh, or 600,000, rupees, almost $10,000, he said. He told me he had six necklaces. He pointed out the imitation coral on some necklaces, clearly distinguishable.
The dances came to a conclusion for the day, with the big day of dances to be the next day. It all appeared to be part of a town festival. In fact, a rock band was setting up nearby to play that night. It was chilly by the end of the afternoon as I took a shared taxi down the road two or three miles to the little lodge where I planned to stay. I got a room shared with a friendly Indian guy from Hyderabad, Nitin, who had just graduated from college and was traveling a bit before heading to the United States to get a masters degree in mechanical engineering. The lodge was run by a friendly Khasi guy with dreadlocks who played a guitar in his small reception room.
I was up about 7:30 the next morning and walked up to the dance ground and back until about 11. The area was rocky and grassy, with yellow grass. You wouldn't have thought it is the rainiest place on earth. I passed houses and several church buildings, including a modern Presbyterian church. The church was established here by Welsh missionaries led by Thomas Jones in 1841. I walked up to a rocky, grassy hilltop cemetery, with yellow grass growing all over and among the broken headstones. Most were only 20 or 30 years old, but there was a memorial to a pastor who died in 1908 and to Mrs. Jones who died in 1846 or so.
Few cars passed on the road, though I did see a few Nanos, the very tiny Indian made cars that originally were produced to sell for one lakh, or 100,000, rupees, only a little more than $2000 at the time. They now sell for more and haven't proven to be very popular. I think I saw more in the Cherrapungee area than in all the rest of India. Few people were out, either, early on a Sunday morning. The kids I did encounter were friendly. I stopped at some megaliths and a cremation platform for Cherrapungee kings.
Nearing the dance ground, I found a path heading into trees and leading to the cliff edge, with great views down into the deep canyon and over to the impressive cliffs on the other side, the ones I had seen the afternoon before from the dance ground. I walked as far as the dance ground, decorated with banners and flags for the festival, and then turned back. On the way back I was surprised to see the Presbyterian church empty on this Sunday morning, but I did come across an outdoor service of the Full Gospel Church, with a preacher and guitar players up on a stage. The sun was out and some of the congregation sheltered under umbrellas.
I had breakfast after 11 and then talked for a while to the dreadlocked manager of the lodge. He told me the present king lives in what he called Upper Sohra, where the market and bus stand are, above the dance ground. He said the dance was a cultivation dance. I asked about the two names -- Cherrapungee and Sohra -- and he told me that perhaps outsiders heard "Sohra" as "Cherra," and that "pungee" means "village" in Bengali.
I ate lunch about 1:30 and then took a shared taxi up to the dance ground about 2:30. The dancing had started and lasted until 5:30. A big crowd had gathered, almost all Khasi, though I did see a few outsiders, both Indian and western. Eventually, there must have been 200 or so dancers, all very colorfully arrayed. I sat next to a friendly older woman who had two brothers dancing. She told me the slow moving female dancers, moving only their feet, must be virgins, and dance in the center to be protected by the males. Most of the females have hair reaching down to their waists. She told me they wear false hair. They all wore very red lipstick, too.
Some of the men occasionally danced with swords, twirling them. I saw eight of them together do such a dance. The crowd was friendly and enjoying the spectacle. Often a little boy or girl, or an older one, would come up to his or her mother in the audience for some costume adjustment. One chubby little boy, maybe about 8, particularly seemed to be enjoying himself. The dancing had no big climax. It just petered out, and I took a shared taxi back to the lodge.
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