Classic Kerala: Fort Kochi, Tea Hills, Spice, Houseboat and Marari Beach

Welcome to Kerala. We meet you at Cochin International Airport and drive you about an hour and a quarter to The Malabar House on Parade Road in Fort Kochi, opposite St Francis Church.

The rest of the day is yours. The fishing nets are three minutes' walk away, the hotel has bicycles, and at 8pm there is Carnatic music or classical dance on the patio stage.

OVERNIGHT IN FORT KOCHI

After breakfast your guide takes you through the old town for about half a day. The Portuguese, Dutch and British all built here. You see St Francis Church, India's oldest European church, where Vasco da Gama was first buried, Santa Cruz Basilica, the Dutch Palace at Mattancherry with its murals of the Ramayana, the Jewish Synagogue and the Chinese fishing nets. Your guide shapes the walk to what interests you.

The afternoon is free to explore the fort on foot or sit by the pool at the hotel.

OVERNIGHT IN FORT KOCHI

The Malabar House stands on Parade Road in the heart of Fort Cochin, opposite St Francis Church and a three-minute walk from the Chinese fishing nets. The building's record goes back to 1755, when a Dutchman named Jan Herman Clausing bought it. Spice traders, tea traders and bankers owned it in turn, and in 1997 it opened as Fort Cochin's first boutique heritage hotel. It is a member of Relais & Chateaux.

There are 17 rooms and suites around a courtyard with a pool, and because this is an old building no two are the same. Your Deluxe Room is on the ground floor and opens to a terrace, a sit-out or a patch of garden. Floors are stone, walls run to deep red and turquoise, and the beds are four-posters or carved wooden frames. The owners collect art, and antiques and contemporary works hang throughout the house.

Malabar Junction, the restaurant, cooks Keralan food with Mediterranean influences, with meals also served in the garden by the pool. Every evening at 8pm, weather allowing, there is live Carnatic music or classical dance on the patio stage. Bicycles are free for guests.

Check out at 11am and drive about two hours inland along the Periyar to Windermere River House at Inchathotty, near Neriamangalam. You arrive at about 2pm.

The house sits in two acres of terraced garden on the river bank, with a granite infinity pool facing the water and the hills beyond. Thattekad Bird Sanctuary is close by. Dinner is at the house tonight, cooked from the garden and the local market.

OVERNIGHT IN NERIAMANGALAM

A full day on the river with all meals at the house. Breakfast is served by the water. Join the resident bird expert for a morning walk, or take the guided village walk through 300 homes and their small rubber plantations to the Inchathotty suspension bridge. Kayaks are on the river five kilometres upstream, and the house has bicycles.

Lunch is Kerala home cooking at the restaurant. The afternoon is for the pool, the butterfly garden and the river bank. Dinner at the house.

OVERNIGHT IN NERIAMANGALAM

Windermere River House stands on the banks of the Periyar at Inchathotty, near Neriamangalam, on the road between Kochi and Munnar. It belongs to the family behind Windermere Estate in Munnar, who found the spot in 2012 on their drives between the two. The land was a rubber plantation. It is now two acres of terraced garden, with a small orchard, a patch of nutmeg, a vegetable plot and a lawn that runs down to the river.

The house is built in the manner of a planter's bungalow, and the furniture in the rooms was made on the property. A granite infinity pool looks over the river to the hills, where the sun sets. The living room has board games, books and the best internet signal in the district.

There are no menu cards. Meals are home cooking from the garden and the local market, served course by course. The river is calm for most of the year and runs fast in the monsoon when the Boothathankettu dam opens its shutters. Guests birdwatch in the morning with the resident expert, walk through the village of 300 homes to the Inchathotty suspension bridge, kayak on the river, cycle the lanes or trek into the forest. Thattekad Bird Sanctuary is nearby.

After breakfast check out at 8.45am and drive two hours up into the Western Ghats to Munnar, once the summer capital of the British administration in South India. You reach the town at about 11.30am and go first to the Tata Tea Museum, where the photographs and machinery tell the story of the estates: a 1913 sundial, a 1920s Pelton wheel, the original tea rollers and the black-tea process from leaf to chest. A tea tasting ends the visit.

After lunch stop at the Pothamedu viewpoint for the coffee, tea and cardamom plantations laid out below. Check in at Windermere Estate at 3pm. The estate is a working cardamom and tea plantation at Pothamedu, and your Garden Room is built into the hillside.

OVERNIGHT IN MUNNAR

Windermere Estate is a working cardamom and tea estate at Pothamedu, above Munnar town. The original Planter's Bungalow stands on the best spot on the estate, with views over the tea valleys to the high ranges, and it is still the owner's home. The guest rooms were added around it over many years.

There are 18 rooms in three kinds. Your Garden Room is built chalet style into the mountainside, four to a roof, and opens straight onto the ground.

The restaurant has no menu cards. Meals are served course by course from the estate gardens and the local market, with the staff recommending dishes. Coffee and snacks are taken in the gazebo. Guests walk the plantation paths and the cardamom groves, where Malabar giant squirrels live in the canopy, and climb to the Vantage Point for the view. There is a pool, a library and a garden strung with hammocks.

After breakfast check out and drive to Eravikulam National Park at Rajamalai, home of the Nilgiri tahr, a mountain goat found nowhere else. When the park is closed for the calving season, from 10 January to 15 March, we drive instead to Mattupetty, where wild elephant come down to the meadows.

Then about three hours south along the spine of the Ghats to Thekkady, through tea, then cardamom, then pepper. You arrive at Spice Village, a CGH Earth resort built like a village of the Mannan hill people, with 52 cottages thatched in elephant grass beside the Periyar reserve. The rest of the day is free.

OVERNIGHT IN THEKKADY

After breakfast step out into the Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary, a few minutes from the resort. It covers 777 square kilometres, 360 of them evergreen forest, and has been a tiger reserve since 1978. You take a boat on Periyar Lake, where elephant, bison, sambar and otters come down to the water. The lake was made in 1895 when the British dammed the river, and the drowned trees still stand in it.

The afternoon is free in Kumily, the spice town at the park gate, with its market of cardamom, pepper, cloves and nutmeg. In the evening we take you to the Kathakali and Kalaripayattu show: Kathakali is Kerala's dance drama in elaborate costume and make-up, Kalaripayattu its ancient martial art with swords and staves.

OVERNIGHT IN THEKKADY

Spice Village belongs to CGH Earth, the Kerala family firm that began with the Casino Hotel in Kochi in 1954. The resort was conceived as a village and built the way a village is built, with local materials and native artisans. Its 52 cottages follow the dwellings of the Mannan people of these hills. Every roof is thatched with elephant grass, laid by Mannan thatchers using their own technique.

The twelve-acre garden holds more than 200 species of tree, many of them labelled, and a two-acre vegetable and herb plot. Your Spice Garden Cottage has coir mats on a stone floor and an open porch. There is no air conditioning; the climate at this height does not call for it.

Tamarind Restaurant covers Kerala and international cooking. The 50 Mile Diet restaurant uses only ingredients grown or caught within fifty miles. The Woodhouse Lounge is named for A. W. Woods, forest ranger of the Periyar reserve in the colonial era, whose portrait hangs above a 150-year-old billiards table. The Periyar Tiger Reserve gate is a few minutes away.

After breakfast drive about four hours down from the hills to the backwaters and board your houseboat at Alleppey. The kettuvallam is your home for the night: one air-conditioned bedroom with a bathroom, an open-sided living and dining area, and a crew of three who sail and cook for you.

You cruise through the afternoon along the canals and across Vembanad Lake, past paddy fields below the water line, churches, temples and the villages on the banks. The cook serves lunch and dinner on board, with white prawns and pearl-spot fish from the lake. The boat moors for the night in a quiet stretch of water under the coconut palms.

OVERNIGHT ON THE HOUSEBOAT

A kettuvallam is the traditional cargo boat of the Kerala backwaters, built from planks of jackwood tied with coir rope and no nails. The boats now carry guests instead of rice. Yours has one air-conditioned bedroom with its own bathroom, a sitting and dining area open at the sides, and a sun deck at the bow.

A crew of three sails the boat and cooks on board. Lunch, dinner and breakfast are Keralan, with the backwater fish, prawns and vegetables bought from the villages you pass. The boat cruises through the afternoon along the canals and across the lake, then moors for the night in a quiet stretch of water.

Breakfast is on the boat as it cruises back to the jetty. Disembark at 10am and drive half an hour north to Marari Beach at Mararikulam. Check in is at 2pm.

The resort is laid out like a fishing village behind the beach, with thatched villas in coconut groves. Marari was named among the top five hammock beaches in the world by National Geographic. Your Garden Villa has a private sit-out and a bathroom partly open to the sky. The afternoon is for the sea.

OVERNIGHT AT MARARI BEACH

A free day on the coast. Breakfast at the resort, then the beach, the pool or an Ayurvedic treatment at the centre. Bicycles are available for the lanes behind the beach, where the fishing boats come in and the village market is a short ride away. The resort's naturalists walk the grounds, which hold eleven natural ponds and a butterfly garden of 97 species.

Your last evening is the sunset over the Arabian Sea, then seafood at the Beach Grill.

OVERNIGHT AT MARARI BEACH

After breakfast we drive you about two hours to Cochin International Airport for your flight home.

Marari Beach is on the Arabian Sea at Mararikulam, in the Alappuzha district of Kerala. The resort is laid out like the fishing villages of this coast. The villas have roofs thatched with coconut leaves, renewed each year by women from the village nearby. None of the rooms has a television.

Your Garden Villa has a bedroom with a sitting area, a private sit-out and a bathroom partly open to the sky. The nearest villas are 250 metres from the beach.

Chakara is the buffet restaurant and cooks the food of the fishing communities along the Kerala and Konkan coast. Beach Grill serves seafood by the sand. At the Farm Kitchen guests pick vegetables from the four-acre organic farm and eat with the chef. The grounds hold coconut groves, eleven natural ponds and a butterfly garden where naturalists have counted 97 species. The beach is public and the resort looks after the stretch in front of it.