Coorg

Kodagu — Coorg is the anglicised name — is a fold of the Western Ghats where the Kaveri rises, at Talakaveri in the Brahmagiri hills. For more than two centuries it was a small kingdom ruled from Madikeri by the Haleri rajas, until the British annexed it in 1834. Its people, the Kodavas, are a martial community with their own language, their own clan houses and a famous record of soldiering; two of independent India's army chiefs, Cariappa and Thimayya, came from these hills.

Coffee arrived in the nineteenth century and stayed. What makes Coorg unusual is how it is grown — under a canopy of native rainforest trees, with pepper vines climbing their trunks and cardamom in the damp below. Kodagu now produces more coffee than any other district in India, and from a distance much of it still looks like forest.

Kodava food is its own cuisine. Pandi curry, pork cooked dark with kachampuli, a black vinegar boiled down from a forest fruit, is the dish everyone asks about, and rightly. It comes with kadambuttu, steamed rice balls, or akki otti, flat rice rotis; noolputtu, string hoppers, turn up at breakfast. In the monsoon, bamboo-shoot curry appears, and in the wet months, mushrooms gathered from the estates.

The calendar is agricultural and proud. Kailpodh in early September marks the end of transplanting with the ritual cleaning and worship of family weapons. In mid-October, at Kaveri Sankramana, families gather at Talakaveri for the moment the sacred spring is said to surge. Puttari, the rice harvest, closes the year in late autumn. Visit an ainmane, an old clan house, and you see how much of Kodava life still revolves around the family name.

Come in March or April if you can time it to the first blossom showers: a day or two after the rain, the estates go white and smell of jasmine for about a week. Harvest is December to February, when you can watch picking and drying in the yards. Get to Dubare early for the elephants' morning bath in the river. Raja's Seat is for sunrise, not the crowded evenings. Ask your Saint to arrange lunch in a Kodava home — no restaurant pandi curry quite matches one made in a family kitchen.

Elephants move through these estates and forests, and most of the conflict starts with people. Drive slowly at dusk and keep your distance from any herd. Homestays are family homes, so keep the noise down and the music off. Buy coffee and pepper directly from estates and small growers. In the monsoon, stay on paths — the slopes that slid in 2018 are a reminder of how little it takes.

Coorg's natural pair is Mysuru, three hours down onto the plateau: palaces, a great market, and the same Kaveri, now broad and slow. Many travellers go that way and finish in Bengaluru.