26-year-old Winchester Lyngkhoi carries fresh meat up to his butcher’s stall on market day. When asked if it was hard to live with so much rain, he replied, “We can’t think about that. Here there’s always rain but we have to work, so it’s no good wondering about it.”
New Zealand-based photographer Amos Chapple, who previously shot a leafy ‘tunnel of love’ in Ukraine, has photographed Meghalaya, India, dubbed the “wettest place on Earth.”
You might think that a place where it’s constantly raining would be a lousy photography spot; on the contrary, this makes it fertile ground for unique images that are unlikely to be captured anywhere else in the world.
The village of Mawsynram in the state receives 467 inches of rain annually. Laborers living there wear knups, umbrella-shaped hats made from bamboo and banana leaves, to protect themselves from being soaked while they go about their work.
Another distinctive feature is the use of “living bridges”, which are actually the roots of rubber trees that locals have been “training” and using as transportation for centuries.
The roots strengthen over time as they grow, making them sturdier and longer-lasting than man-made structures.
Scroll down to see some images of this fascinating community, and view more at The Atlantic.
The village of Mawsnyram, which is perched atop a ridge in the Khasi Hills in India’s northeast, claims to have the highest average rainfall on Earth. It receives 467 inches of rain annually. The heavy rainfall is due to summer air currents passing over steaming floodplains in Bangladesh, gathering moisture as they move north. When the clouds reach the hills of Meghalaya, they are forced through the narrow gap in the atmosphere to the point where they cannot hold their moisture anymore, resulting in torrential rainfall.
Laborers wearing knups clearing rockfall after heavy rain the night before in Mawsynram. They are tasked with keeping the roads passable until October when the rainy season ends, and heavy machinery can be used to carry out repairs. They earn $2.60 a day.
Local boys walk over a tree root bridge currently being forged, deep in the jungle near Mawsynram. The skeleton of the bridge is bamboo, with tendrils from the surrounding rubber trees being fixed onto the structure strand by strand. According to locals, the tree roots will still be able to support a person’s weight even after the bamboo has rotted away within 6 to 8 years.
Aside from the bridges, the jungles beneath Mawsynram hide “living ladders” curled into shape to assist villagers descending the steep Khasi hills.
[via PetaPixel and The Atlantic, images by Amos Chapple via The Atlantic]