It's A Jungle Out There

There’s only one word you can hold high in a cartoon-like bubble above your head, just like you’d hold a big flaming torch in the darkest cave: awesome! This place is awesome! This should be used for the times you return from the speechless bewilderment when confronted with the scenery of Cherrapunjee. No wonder you stumble on every little pebble in your path: this isn’t a time to be looking at your feet; time well spent here is having your eyes wide open, looking over the plateau stretching all around, speckled with valleys so deep that the foaming rivers seem mere brush strokes somewhere far below. You can argue that the place is even more awe-inspiring when the rainy season strikes head-on and the plains turn to a surreal green full of the strangest creatures that walked the earth: butterflies the size of a large cabbage leaf, centipedes with Mohawks, and slugs that cause all your hairs to stand to attention. Anywhere you turn you can see waterfalls, big or small, but each as impressive as the next one. And you’d think that such a rainy place would have you clattering your teeth because of the cold but you’d be wrong. Well, mostly.

There’s the nasty little feeling when, waking up in the morning, after a good night’s sleep thanks to the humdrum sound of raindrops falling on the roof, and to the makeshift wind chime clatter coming from the television tower across the road… that’s when you get that unmistakable feeling that, in spite of all of Mother Nature's beauty, which you can observe all day long, you still need to use the toilet. Right this minute. And, as there’s only an outhouse 30m away, you sigh, give up the warm embrace of your bed, step outside and start running. And then you stop, return, hastily grab the umbrella and make a run for it again.

When you feel you have admired and awsome’d enough (which will probably never happen), you can tackle the 3500 steps down to the jungle strategically hidden in one of the valleys. The 1000m elevation difference allows for a new type of scenery to unfold magnificently, so that you don’t need to discard your bubble of awesomeness just yet: it’s a real jungle out there, where climbers and creepers rule even over the people, who seem to have vines instead of veins blending perfectly into the background. You’ll soon feel like a modern age Alice who has stepped into never-never land and will have the urge to have a pleasant conversation with everything surrounding you, flowers and insects alike. There’s no end to the hours you can spend watching the spiders spin their cobwebs and there’s no explanation as to why these creatures deliberately place their traps at a human head level, so that wherever you walk, adopting the same looking-everywhere-around-you-except-where-you-step pace, you’ll inevitably end up with strands of webs across your face.

And once you reach the root bridges, you’ll never want to see concrete again!

Awesome!