Travel features | Getting lost in and around Shillong, Meghalaya

Ward's Lake, Shillong. (Photo: Sanjukta Sharma)

The new luxury for adventurous travellers is to stump the travel agent. To experience “no pains, no gain” travel. To be afoot — or afloat, or just dumped by any expensive, experience-driven travel company — in the middle of nowhere. To soak forest baths and talk with nature, however that pans out. To be lost in Concordia, Pakistan, or Robinson Crusoe Island, Chile. Or Mawlynnong, Meghalaya. The London-based travel company Black Tomato sells such adrift-ing with the very-2023 adage, "Get Lost". You drop a client somewhere spectacular and haunting, and scantly populated, and challenge them to find their way out within a stipulated time.

Companies like Black Tomato go with the idea that people often don’t know where they want to go, but they do have a sense of how they want to feel. In the end of 2022, far into 2023 and beyond, this is a kind of luxury people will pay lakhs of rupees for. In Meghalaya, the feeling is certainly that of being lost — lost in the beauty of nature, and in a time capsule.

The Northeast, although unstoppably a new tourist attraction, has some such "get lost" destinations. Meghalaya, which means “abode of the clouds”, has some of the most spectacular mountainous vistas in the country — the early sunlight on the forested mountains of the East Himalayas often make them look different hues of blue, green and purple. Gorging waterfalls appear out of nowhere as you travel through Meghalaya’s newly-minted smooth highways. Stop at villages, take detours. Getting lost is the idea. And amid that much prettiness, it doesn’t feel like a challenge.

The artwork in Bob Dylan café, Shillong. (Photo: Sanjukta Sharma)

The gateway to Meghalaya is its capital, Shillong. In the 1980s, when I was growing up in Assam, Shillong meant all things cool. First, Shillong loves Bob Dylan. It has a café called Bob Dylan Café. Tucked away down a tiny street, it is full of Dylan memorabilia, from rare posters on the walls to themed ceiling panels painted by customers. Spearheaded by its own iconic rockstar Lou Majaw (now in his seventies), there is an annual Bob Dylan concert. I remember eating Naga chilli toast, tears streaming down from the heat unleashed on the conduits of my sinuses, while listening to Dylan’s Simple twist of fate blaring from the café’s raspy audio system. The main market of Shillong, Police Bazaar, used to have the best of Bangkok fashion. Shillong musicians and writers, and there are several of them, didn’t win that many Sahitya Academy awards, but they wrote and sang the soulful and the trenchant with equal zeal.

Rock 'n roll is alive. The state’s concerts calendar is packed after a gap during the pandemic years: The Cherry Blossom Festival had several rock, jazz and blue acts in the last week of November. The cherry blossoms are, of course, real. Residents say that the lockdown Novembers of 2021 was spectacularly beautiful. All eyes were on the pink cherry blossom cornucopia, arching over deserted streets, suddenly visible to its residents. "Shine A Light: Voice of the Silent Hills", at the magically cloud-brushed Sa-I-Mika in Cherrapunji, about an hour’s drive from Shillong, is held in the first week of December. After the death of Neil Nongkynrih, director of the Shillong Chamber Choir, the choir members are at work producing a single inspired by rail journeys and “Uncle Neil”; they released their new single Songs of Dawn earlier this year, and their Christmas iteration this year is eagerly awaited in Shillong as well as by fans everywhere. Chief minister Conrad Sangma is known to strum a note or two and break into dance at concerts, and so do some members of the opposition. Tickets for The Shillong Winter Music Carnival, on January 7 and 8, will open for booking soon on Insider.in

Shillong was once a village. The East India Company made it the new civil station of the Khasi and Jaintia Hills in 1864. It served as the summer capital of the Eastern Bengal and Assam for almost a century, and remained the administrative capital of undivided

Assam until 1969, when the autonomous state of Meghalaya was formed.

I visited Meghalaya in September this year for a landmark 10th time. After eating the world’s best momos at Nongpoh, on a leisurely car ride from Guwahati, we had to stop right where Shillong begins. It was a traffic bottleneck on the narrow entry-way.

We waited behind a long line of cars for about half an hour. Some locals see increasing development of commercial and residential properties as a strain on Shillong’s geographical and infrastructural realities. The native Khasi population’s historical hostility towards outsider — the local word for an outsider is “dkhar” — still explodes once in a while, but now Shillong looks more homogenous than ever before. It’s the rapid vertical development. In Shillong itself, it’s no longer possible to experience that Shillong of old, the "Scotland of the East" Shillong. To be really lost, you have to travel out of town for it — to Sohra or Cherrapunji, still wet and still breathtaking, the way rain, the rare sunlight bursts, clouds and the mountains present themselves in symphonies. To the root bridges of Shillong and Cherrapunji, taking in the ancient, rugged beauty of the Ficus elastica trees where bio-engineering meets human zeal. Bridges shaped out of the brawny roots of the tree connect villages and villagers, facilitate marriages and commerce, and bring in tourists.

The crystal-clear Umngot river in Dawki, bordering Bangladesh. (Photo: Mondakranta Saikia via Unsplash)

Living, breathing and growing constantly, the Nongriat valley region around Cherrapunji has around six such functional bridges. To Dawki, bordering Bangladesh, fluid in every sense of the world, where the water of the Dawki river is so crystal clear you can see swaying weeds and stars of small fish several feet below the water.

Dawki is a testament of the overflow of human enterprise from one geographical border to another, and why anti-immigration policies and rhetoric anywhere in the world, especially in the Northeast, can be a joke.

Four hours drive south of Shillong, through an exquisite landscape of low hills and deep gorges, is a tiny village of 500-odd people called Mawlynnong which has been attracting visitors because of its bizarre tag of ‘Asia’s Cleanest Village’. Is Mawlynnong indeed so?

Living-roots bridge, Mawlynnong, Meghalaya. (Photo: Sanjukta Sharma)

There’s no way to prove. But what is easy to see is that this village encapsulates something timeless about Khasi culture, a culture in which both public and private tidiness is considered religious. On our way to Dawki, we always stop at roadside momo and thukpa stalls. Every time, my Mumbai being, used to ubiquitous filth, gets a jolt: How can a roadside stall have such squeaky clean bathrooms and utensils? The neat cottages of Mawlynnong, their perfectly-trimmed flower gardens, khoh baskets hanging on every second tree for the garbage, all remind regular visitors of a time what Shillong once was. Our guide, familiar with every tree and stone in the village says living clean is more than congenital in the residents of Mawlynnong; they have adopted new methods of hygiene and sustainable living, such as composting their vegetable waste.

Paradoxically, much of the plastic waste here comes with tourists — a warning of what it might become, or what Shillong has become. Like any place, Meghalaya is best enjoyed when we allow ourselves to be lost. Here, you can get lost without spending a lot of money.