DESTINATIONS KERA | ASIA
RIGHT AND BELOW: Xandari Harbour hotel FAR RIGHT:
a tea plantation near Munnar PICTURES: Shutterstock
The Dutch Palace (Mattancherry Palace) was really built by the Portuguese and only renovated by the Dutch, but inside, the Ramayana Mural Room artfully depicts an Indian Hindu epic in 300-year-old natural pigments. Over the centuries, Kochi has been occupied by various European powers, starting with the Portuguese, who made it their first Indian colony in 1503. The Dutch and British came later, and Portuguese explorer Vasco de Gama died and was buried here – a visit to the simple, white-fronted Church of Saint Francis affords a chance to see where he lay in rest for 14 years until his remains were moved to Lisbon. But Kochi isn’t all history: arriving early in the morning, our guide and manager of destination management company Le Passage to India, Suraj, points to a car-park-sized area full of solar panels. “The airport is completely solar powered,” he beams. “It’s the first airport in the world to run completely on the sun.” Arriving at our hotel, the Xandari Harbour (standard
room: £98 per night with breakfast), we’re greeted with more environmental initiatives: the hotel is made from local raw materials; toiletries come in refillable glass bottles and drinking water is put through a filtration system.
MUNNAR From Kochi, we strike out for the hill country, as the rain begins to pour relentlessly. We’ve come at the tail end of the wet season, which runs from June to September, and is best avoided unless you want a good soaking.
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go for goa
Goa makes an easy add-on to this trip, with plentiful flights from Kerala via Bengaluru (Bangalore). As opposed to the state’s party-hard north coast, southern Goa is more tranquil, with deserted beaches and tucked-away resorts such as the luxurious Alila Diwa (pictured), where the pool looks out over rice paddies, and a buggy service (or easy 15-minute walk down a palm-lined dirt drive) drops you at white-sand Gonsua Beach. Alila Diwa’s many restaurants are top notch (as is the poolside cafe, which serves craft beer brewed in Goa), but sneak away to Greenland, a beach-shack bar and restaurant for a truly Goan meal of spicy fried fish – caught that day on the owners’ boat – accompanied by a huge bottle of cold Kingfisher.
The Western Ghats range rises 80 miles inland from Kochi and runs south along the state
border with Tamil Nadu. Designated a Unesco World Heritage Site, these mountains are home to thousands of rare flowering plants and insects, and animals and fish species not found elsewhere. It’s also a centre of Indian tea production, particularly in the historic hill-station town of
Munnar, where the mountainsides are covered in a mosaic of emerald-green, terraced tea fields. After a visit to the informative tea museum, where we learn how tea is grown and processed, we hike up through the tea bushes, finding spectacular views over undulating hills. Some travellers turn this into a trek of several days, but even an hour’s ramble up the hillsides in the rain leaves me breathless – and ready for a cuppa. A magical place to stay is mountaintop resort Windermere Estate, where owner (and
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