Plantation Retreats in Kerala by Sue Carpenter

I am lying in a hammock after a slap-up Sunday lunch, watching the sunlight filter through the coconut palms, listening to our hosts Victor and Jini Dey playing a lively game of cocktail-fuelled rummy with their pals. Ah, the planter’s life is an enviable one!

Or so it would seem at Tranquil, an eight-room hideaway on a 400-acre coffee and vanilla estate in the unspoilt Wayanad district of north Kerala. But the fact is, the planter’s life is in jeopardy. The bottom has dropped out of the tea and coffee markets. Kerala, once one of the leading producers of the world, is now losing out to cheaper suppliers from Sri Lanka, China and Vietnam. Pepper, cardamom, too, once hot commodities, are no longer commanding top prices. What’s a planter to do? Diversify.

Quality tourism is the new gold and planters are responding by turning their properties into guest houses, offering full board, plantation tours and nature walks in invariably heavenly surroundings. Estate director Victor and his wife Jini lead the field with Tranquil, where they capture the old lazy, indulgent way of life while ensuring modern efficiency and comforts.

“We had a small taste of the planter’s life,’ recalls Victor over drinks on his terrace that evening, three faithful hounds at his feet. ‘Fifteen years ago, the pressure was much less. The industry was doing well, the weather was on our side with plenty of rain. Life centred around the club. We’d play tennis in the afternoon, go on fishing trips and picnics. Those were the glory days … but even then, a senior planter said to me, ‘Young man, we lived; you’re just existing!’”

If that’s the case, then the Deys certainly know how to exist. As professional planters working for a wealthy proprietor, they were given carte blanche to transform the estate and a pair of dilapidated bungalows. It’s clear from the moment you enter the gates, driving past shade-netted vanilla vines and orderly coffee plants to their own well tamed tropical gardens, that they are not keen on half measures. Jini presides over housekeeping and the kitchen, devising spectacular lunch and dinner-party menus around seasonal produce (‘If I have ripe mangoes, I’ll do a soufflé’). Guests dine at one long table amid an array of crisp napiery and floral art, verandas and paths are swept twice daily, sheets and towels are reassuringly white, a hibiscus is placed on the bed at night and bathrooms are almost as large as the bedrooms.

‘One guest said to me, you’re different from other Indians,’ says Victor. ‘You don’t say, “chalta hai” – anything goes.’ For the Deys, only the best goes, an attitude they attribute to their part-European heritages – Victor’s mother, Norma (who lives with the couple and joins us for meals) is English-Portuguese and his father was French-Bengali, while Jini has a Scottish grandmother.

One afternoon Victor bundles us into his jeep and careers up a twisting track, past coffee bushes which have blossomed overnight, sprouting cream pompoms with the scent of jasmine. Slipping easily into the role of expansive host, he regales us with stories and local knowledge in his clipped baritone. We arrive at a viewpoint over the vast plains, and within moments, platters of onion pakoras and melt-in-the-mouth blueberry tartlets appear, to help the sun go down.

The following day, Victor shows us his new venture, 40 acres of precious vanilla orchids. Aside from tourism, vanilla is the new hope for planters, with world demand exceeding supply by 700 per cent. The neon dollar signs in our eyes soon fade, however, as we learn about Princess Vanilla. This is one high-maintenance crop, with a drying process that defies belief (dip beans in water at 65 degrees for three minutes, wrap them in a woollen blanket for the night, lay them out for eight days under a black cloth, leave them for a further three months in a humidified room…).

At the cocktail hour, Jini appears in a cool kaftan and Victor in crisp kurta-pyjama, eager for us to taste his latest alcoholic experiment. We gag on the neat vanilla-infused gin but warm to the vanilla vodka. Our fellow guests, two couples from the Shires, join us and soon the house party is in full swing. Don’t the Deys ever want to switch off? ‘Unless you’re a people person this would be a disaster,’ says Victor. ‘To us, it’s not even an infringement on our privacy. We’ve made a lot of friends who come back each year.’

At Windermere Estate near Munnar, at 1600 metres, the atmosphere is less festive but the setting more dramatic, amid clipped tea plantations that line the vertiginous hills like vivid green intestines. Dr Simon bought Windermere 18 years ago as a working cardamom and coffee estate, but when hoteliers started bidding for his property in 1999, he built his own five-bedroom ‘farmhouse’ for guests. We stayed in one of two new spacious cottages, with fabulous views over the misty mountains and forests.

While Simon has avoided anything that smacks of a hotel (no reception, informal staff), this is less a homestay (Simon only resides in the old planter’s bungalow at weekends) than a glorified B&B, where you dine at your own table in the chalet-style kitchen-dining room. After a gargantuan breakfast (we tucked into South Indian uppma [like couscous], appam [little white pancakes] and vegetable curry, along with crispy bacon, tiny sausages and eggs), we set off for a nearby peak, hiking up through the tea plants, marvelling at how pluckers can pluck at this gradient.

Later we tour his plantation, through virgin forest of soaring ironwood and banyan trees and rustly arcades of cardamom leaves, with clusters of young green pods at the base. By the end of our trip through Kerala, we are spice experts, easily detecting peppervines, with their dangling bunches of green peppercorns, and coffee bushes, with their red beans. ....

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