Eventually, we ended up in the 1920s, at 1,828m, near Munnar. The creators of the Talayar Tea Estate had obviously designed their house to survive India and look like England. Being made of granite, the first bit was easy but, despite some solid English furniture, it had proved hard to pass it off as Blighty. This, I realised, was largely because of the tea; we were in the middle of the tea-planters’ equivalent of the Prairies, except vertical and green. The other reason was that India simply won’t be ignored. Panthers often come up here, the cook told us, and every now and then wild elephants appear and grub up all his carrots.

It was a confusing place – but whether England or India, this century or the last, it was exorbitantly beautiful. All around us the valley walls rose, in a privet-green tapestry of tea. I’ve never seen mountains looking so tame, as if they’d been clipped like topiary. Way below, we could even make out waterfalls, vast rock gardens and a cluster of matching lilac cottages. These were the workers’ lines, explained our host, Vinoo Roberts. Every 17 days, he said, this little army of mountain gardeners would harvest the entire valley. Later, we went down there, and I noticed that most of the workers were Communists – around their homes, at least. Up in the hills, however, they built shrines and were generally more godly.

‘Keralites,’ said Vinoo shrewdly, ‘aren’t black-and-white about these things.’

Vinoo was an engaging host, and a powerful advocate for tea. One morning, he took us tea-picking with the workers. After an hour, we’d picked six kilograms, which was worth a wage of 30p. Then Vinoo took our tea to the factory, where it was wilted, crushed, torn, curled, fermented, dried, and graded. The next day, our offering (now a shrivelled kilo) was in its own packet, neatly labelled ‘Gimlette’s 2006 Garden Fresh Tea’.

The Sunday Times Travel Magazine - December

10 classic India stories

The travel editor at Times Online delves into the collection to choose his favourite features on India in 2007

BACKGROUND

• Mumbai: a city of two tales

• At home in the Himalayas

• A wild time in India's tiger territory

• Tamil Nadu hotels and temples

BACKGROUND

• Planning travel to India

• Is it safe to drive in India?

• Can you recommend a Delhi travel agent?

• A train passage through India

Another day, Vinoo took us to see a half-lost tribe, who’d never seen the point in tea. The Muthuvans live in mud huts two hours’ walk up Snake Mountain, and spend their lives gathering wild honey and worshipping the spirits of the forest. Jayne and I had always anticipated an encounter like this, and so we’d come with a rucksack filled with our toddler’s old clothes. As a gesture, it was a flop. The women all fled, and the tribesmen stood around looking heroically unimpressed by this sudden surge of pink. Worse still, there didn’t seem to be any children. So perhaps they thought it was all a horrible joke.

‘No,’ said Vinoo, ‘The children are all out, playing in the forest.’

‘When are they back?’

The tribesmen shrugged. ‘Probably, next week.’

We made our way back down from the Ghats – and forward about 500 years – to a hip hotel where it could easily be 2017. ‘The Serenity’, in Vazhoor, was originally built as a rubber-planter’s house in 1901, and was now a little haven of boutique art and equally boutique mango curries. It was appropriately named. Although it was nice to think of all those trees busily at work, producing the next generation of tennis balls and tyres, the prospect of serenity seemed infinitely better. I spent the afternoon bobbing around in a cool green pool, and reading a book about the medicine of Kerala. Daisies were good for stiff necks, I learnt; cloves for ‘foul gases’; and borage for hysteria.

Apart from the staff, looking cool and flitting about in black, we had only one visitor. Lakshmi was 30, turned up at breakfast and ate 45 bananas. She then lifted Jayne onto her head, and set off round the garden. Despite being an elephant, there was something rather human about Lakshmi: she had freckles, and sighed whenever she was told what to do. It took ages to coax Jayne down off her head, and even Lakshmi seemed to have enjoyed the encounter. She was last seen padding off to work, wagging her tail like a dog.

We spent our last few days drifting between ancient and modern on the great undecided lake of Vembanad. The difficulty it has always had is in deciding whether it’s like the High Seas or the Norfolk Broads. For much of the year it’s the latter: calm, fresh, abundant, and fed by hundreds of kilometres of channels (known here as The Backwaters). Then, between March and May, the saltwater returns, reasserting the more ascetic regime of the sea. It’s a harsh life for the people who live here, snatching a rice harvest before the salt, and with water always up to their knees. To the first outsiders, this was Kuttanad: The Land of Short Legs.

That first morning, we boarded a giant snake-shaped canoe called a kettuvallam, and puttered over the lake. It was like exploring the surface of an enormous mirror, only a thin brocade of palms defining the beginning of water and the end of sky. In the middle of this magnificent silvery void, a strange life existed. We came across fishermen catching pearl spot fish in their hands, cement-makers digging for mussel shells with long poles, and a man doing his laundry. Like theirs, our canoe had once been a working boat, and had hauled rice from one end of the channels to the other (five days, according to the captain, punted along by pole). Unlike theirs, our vessel now had a gigantic basket attached to its hull, containing a bedroom, a bathroom, a drawing room, and a team of Keralite cooks.

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