BREATHE GREENERY

WAYANAD

Many Keralans rate the elevated Wayanad region as the most beautiful part of their state. Encompassing part of a remote forest reserve that spills into Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, Wayanad’s landscape combines mountain scenery, rice paddies of ludicrous green, skinny betel nut trees, bamboo, red earth, spiky ginger fields, and rubber, cardamom and coffee plantations. Foreign travellers stop here on the bus route between Mysore, Bangalore or Ooty and Kerala, but it’s still fantastically unspoilt and satisfyingly remote. It's also an excellent place to spot wild elephants.

MUNNAR

The rolling hills around Munnar, South India's largest tea-growing region, are carpeted in emerald-green tea plantations, contoured, clipped and sculpted like ornamental hedges. The low mountain scenery is magnificent – you’re often up above the clouds watching veils of mist clinging to the mountaintops. Munnar town itself is a scruffy, traffic-clogged administration centre, not unlike a North Indian hill station, but wander just a few kilometres out of town and you’ll be engulfed in a sea of a thousand shades of green. Once known as the High Range of Travancore, today Munnar is the commercial centre of some of the world’s highest tea-growing estates. The majority of the plantations are operated by corporate giant Tata, with some in the hands of local cooperative Kannan Devan Hills Plantation Company (KDHP).

ALLEPEY

Kerala's main backwaters stretch north, east and south of Alleppey while Vembanad Lake, Kerala's largest, reaches all the way to Kochi. Along the coast, Marari has developed into a fully fledged beach resort.