Kerala: A Country of Its Own

Kerala does not feel like the rest of India, and it will tell you so within an hour of arrival. The literacy, the churches next to temples next to mosques, the arguing over politics in the tea shop — this is a place with its own weather and its own opinions.

The backwaters are the reason most travellers come, and they are misunderstood. They are not a wilderness. They are a landscape of villages: paddy fields below sea level, a school jetty, a woman washing steel plates in the same water a boat is drifting through. The pleasure is domestic, not dramatic.

Nothing in Kerala is in a hurry, and it is contagious within a day.

Up into the green

Three hours inland the temperature drops ten degrees and the hills are shaved into tea. Munnar in the early morning is mist moving through rows planted a century ago, with pickers working a slope so steep it seems unreasonable.

Then there is the food, which is the actual argument for coming: coconut, curry leaf, tamarind, fish that was in the sea at breakfast. Eat at a toddy shop once. It will ruin hotel dining for the rest of the trip.