The wettest place on Earth — where monsoon clouds are torn apart on the Meghalaya plateau edge
Mawsynram holds the Guinness World Record for the highest average annual rainfall on Earth — around 11,872mm per year, compared to London's 600mm. The village sits on the southern edge of the Meghalaya plateau in the East Khasi Hills, where moisture-laden Bay of Bengal air is forced violently upward by the escarpment. The result is six months of near-continuous rain from May to October, waterfalls that appear from cliff faces like curtains, and an eerie, cloud-wrapped landscape of living root bridges, limestone caves, and sacred groves. Outside monsoon season it is surprisingly accessible and…
Mawsynram and the surrounding East Khasi Hills have been inhabited by the Khasi people for millennia, a matrilineal society with strong traditions of sacred groves (law kyntang) and animist-Christian spiritual practices. The living root bridges — engineered by training rubber fig tree roots over bamboo scaffolding for decades until they can support human weight — are a Khasi invention found nowhere else on earth, some of them 500 years old. The area gained international attention in 1984 when the Guinness Book of World Records recognised it as the world's wettest place, displacing the prior r…