WATER · MOSTLY MONSOON-FED
India's famous falls have parking lots, fences and selfie queues. These do not. Every corner below holds falls you reach on foot, in season, often with a forest guard's permission slip in your pocket. Monsoon-fed means exactly that: check the season window before you drive.
The Cherrapunji of the south: king cobra country, forest waterfalls and sunsets over an ocean of green.
Barkana and Onake Abbi: two of the south's great falls, both walked in through king-cobra rainforest with a forest guide.
India's herping capital, a forest the size of a district, and a craft town under the ghat's western lip.
Amboli's monsoon cascades run beside the road itself; the Tilari forest hides the bigger, nameless ones.
The Goa beyond the beach: 12th-century forest temples, sanctuary waterfalls and villages that never sold a ticket.
Netravali and Tambdi Surla's falls inside the sanctuary belt - Goa's water without Goa's crowds.
Shivaji's hill forts, origin rivers and monsoon-soaked plateaus within a long weekend of two cities.
Monsoon waterfalls off every fort scarp: Bhimashankar's origin streams and Kothaligad's spilling ramparts.
Handloom towns, the state's tallest falls and the gentlest, greenest hill country in the region.
Vantawng, Mizoram's tallest, drops 750 feet into a gorge you view from a forest shelter - plus a string of unnamed falls on the Tuivai.
Fossil canyons, Asia's second-biggest river island and bamboo-trail villages, far from the Cherrapunji caravan.
Wahkhen's bamboo-trail falls and the fossil-canyon cascades of Mawlyngbna, far from Cherrapunji's caravan.
Trout springs, Mughal-era gardens without the crowds, and a seasonal road into the most isolated valley in Kashmir.
South Kashmir's meadow streams drop off the Pir Panjal in a dozen half-known falls; Aharbal is the loud one, the rest you ask shepherds about.
Apple orchards giving way to a 3,750 m pass and villages that see a dozen visitors a year.
The Pabbar's tributaries fall off the Chanshal flanks all monsoon; the valley road is a waterfall census.
Rajasthan's green, wet, tribal south: lake islands, Bhil country and palaces nobody has queued for since ever.
Rajasthan's wet south: the Mahi's country holds monsoon falls near Banswara that most of Rajasthan has never heard of.