Meghalaya's Living Root Bridges are footpaths grown out of a tree that is still alive. A rubber fig is planted on the bank, and its pliable aerial roots are threaded through hollowed-out areca palm trunks aimed at the far side. The roots reach across, thicken and knit into a deck firm enough to walk on — a jingkieng jri. A finished span carries fifty people and can stand for centuries. The East Khasi Hills take the heaviest rain on Earth, and wood rots in that climate while steel rusts, so the Khasi and Jaintia answered the problem with a tree.
Mawsynram averages some 11,870 mm of rain a year, and Sohra once took 9,300 mm in a single July. The work is so slow that those who train the first roots often never cross the finished bridge. A 2019 survey documented 76 of them, from 2 metres long to nearly 53. The best known stands at Nongriat, where two decks hang one above the other over the Umshiang stream; the upper one, villagers say, was grown after the swollen river kept swallowing the lower. Reaching it means a staircase of roughly 3,500 stone steps down into the gorge, and every one of them back up. Down there the air is warm and thick, and the roots are furred with moss and ferns. Step onto the deck and it gives slightly underfoot, because it is alive and still growing. Few new ones are grown for their old purpose, though: a concrete footbridge is usable within a month, a root bridge within a generation.