Backwaters & Blue Hills, 7 Nights

You are met at Cochin airport and driven across to Fort Kochi. The afternoon covers the cantilevered Chinese fishing nets on the Vasco da Gama Square waterfront, St Francis Church where Vasco da Gama was first buried, and the Mattancherry Dutch Palace with the Paradesi Synagogue in Jew Town. The evening is a live Kathakali performance at the Kerala Kathakali Centre — arrive an hour early and you watch the actors build the green face paint from scratch.

The 130 km climb to Munnar takes about four hours and stops at the Cheeyappara and Valara waterfalls and the Karadipara viewpoint above the Idukki gorge. A working cardamom and pepper plantation en route explains exactly why Europe went looking for a sea route to this coast. You reach Munnar at 1,600 m by mid-afternoon, with the Kannan Devan tea slopes already filling the windscreen.

A full day on the high range. Mattupetty Dam opens with a twenty-minute speedboat run, Echo Point and Kundala Lake follow, and the road runs on to Top Station for the view down into Tamil Nadu. Back in town the KDHP Tea Museum still runs its original rolling machine, and the tasting at the end is the best half-hour in Munnar.

Three hours south through Kundala and Poopara brings you into the cardamom hills at Thekkady. The afternoon is the Kerala Forest Department boat cruise on Periyar Lake, where herds of sambar and gaur come down to the drowned tree line and elephants are a fair-weather bet rather than a promise. The evening is a Kalaripayattu demonstration — Kerala’s own martial art, and the older of the two on the subcontinent.

You board a private kettuvallam at Punnamada around noon and the boat casts off immediately. The afternoon drifts through the Vembanad canals past Kuttanad’s paddy fields, which are farmed nearly two metres below sea level and are the only such fields in India. Lunch, dinner and next morning’s breakfast are cooked on board — karimeen pollichathu wrapped in banana leaf is the dish to ask for. The boat anchors at dusk; houseboats are not permitted to move after dark.

Disembark after breakfast and drive four hours south through Kollam and Varkala’s red cliffs to Kovalam. The rest of the day is yours on Lighthouse Beach, the southernmost of the three crescents, with the 1972 Vizhinjam lighthouse open to climbers until five. Sunset here drops straight into the Arabian Sea with nothing in the way.

A half day in Thiruvananthapuram covers Sree Padmanabhaswamy Temple, where the dress code is strict — mundu for men, saree or half-saree for women, both available at the gate — and the Napier Museum in its Indo-Saracenic pavilion. The afternoon is a backwater boat at Poovar, where the Neyyar river, the backwater and the open sea meet across a single sand bar. Evening free on the beach.

Breakfast at leisure, then a 25-minute transfer to Trivandrum International for your flight home. If your departure is late afternoon we hold the room until noon and add a stop at the Kanakakunnu Palace grounds and the Chalai bazaar on the way.