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for a clear, clear day.
Then, wherever you might be in God's own country,
just look high to the east, above and beyond the paddy fields and the palm tops.
Pitched and standing like pavilions against the horizon will be rows of faint
blue smudges, fading into the sky.
These are the highlands of Kerala, and
they are another world.
A few hours inland from the coast are places of cool
mists and sun-dappled, silent valleys, home to vast plantations of teak, cardamom,
tea, rubber and coffee.
Home also, to an astonishing biodiversity, preserved
today in some fine wildlife sanctuaries.
For centuries, tribal cultures built
their own unique habitats in these mountains. Empires ebbed and flowed across
the plains, but they left the Mannans and the Ooralies untouched. Here continued
an ancient wisdom, a way of living that sustained itself from nature, yet respected
it and left it uncorrupted.
Spice Village Resort (See
map)
is our tip of the hat
to this wisdom. A timeless experience in ecological living, recreated for the
modern traveler. Dawn
over the roofs of Spice Village Virtual
visit: look over the central spaces |
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Curling
around a misty ridge 2,000 ft high in the Periyar fastness, we found an arborarium,
one man's personal forest, with fruit trees, rare herbs and a profusion of flowering
plants.
And here, we set out to build a resort. A village, produced whole,
using mountain spirit and tribal wisdom as building material.
Your cottage
is brick and log, the roof thatched with the same elephant grass used in tribal
huts, woven in the same traditional techniques.
Of course, the comforts of
a modern hotel exist, but they never intrude. Modern plumbing, comfortable beds
and hot showers find their place, but in a setting stripped down to its natural
essence.
Hewn stone replaces shag carpets. Birdsong takes the place of television.
Air-conditioning? Unnecessary anyway in the fine mountain climate, and what
would it do but mask the heady scents of spice forests?
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| A
standard room (left). The Tiger Room,
the starting point for your treks into
Periyar. | |
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At
Spice Village, its easy to think that you're in the middle of wild nature. Not
so. These trees were born out of one man's passion.
His name was A. W. Woods.
An Anglo-Indian, he worked for the Government of the British Raj in the 1930s.
Woods was a remarkable man, nearly illiterate, given charge of the forests solely
on the basis of his passion for nature and his love and understanding of the local
Ooralie culture.
Woods also had the greenest of thumbs. And on the grounds
surrounding his home (now the Woodhouse Bar), he created a remarkable arborarium.
You can still take a deck chair out to his verandah, sip (what else?) a gin-and-tonic
and say hello to its denizens.
A kingfisher dives low out of a clear blue
sky, hunting vainly for its fish lunch. Bees hum around teak trees, and Colombian
coffee bushes. Guinea fowls and ducks chatter about (amazingly tame, because they're
used to guests.) Bamboos burst in tilting spires. Cascades of trumpet flowers,
pepper vines and honeysuckle wash down the hillsides. And everywhere, the structures
of Spice Village peep out of the woods, as if growing naturally from the surroundings.
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