Impressions, Kerala Tourism

According to the sign on the front door of his cottage, the Honorary British Consul to Cochin is "Out". But I knock anyway.

An unmistakably British voice shouts: "Come in!" I step into a high, dim room furnished with cane chairs, faded Indian fabrics and framed Dickens illustrations. A fan whirs; a plastic fly-swatter sits on a side table; and over on the right, Kenneth Lawrence-Bandey, MBE, is lying on a day bed. The Hon British Consul, 82 years old, but is still available if British tourists get into a spot of bother, is recovering from a hip injury.

Having lived in Kerala for 50 years, he is well placed to reflect on changes to this lush, hot, clean, literate and courteous Indian state. In the 1950s, he saw most of the last resident Brits "trickle away" just as he was arriving. A decade later he watched the first backpackers trundle in.

From his home in Fort Cochin, the most tourist-drenched of Cochin's settlements, he has seen countless tour groups pile out of their coaches to photograph the pretty Chinese fishing nets on the quay. And now he is seeing Kerala set its sights upmarket.

The state, which some still romantically call the Malabar Coast, has long had the most beguiling image: idle beaches and idyllic backwaters, mazes of rivers and lagoons, coconut palms and paddy fields of dazzling emerald green; India without the clamour.

The danger is that it could go the way of Goa, where cheap beach packages have left some stretches of the coast dispiritingly downmarket. So Kerala's tourism authorities are hoping to entice higher-spending visitors to designer hotels, exclusive plantation retreats and luxury cruises.

Outside, the suburban-looking houses and the cricket matches on the maidan, or village green, give Fort Cochin, for all its rich Dutch and Portuguese history, a hint of Oxted with banyan trees. It's not a hectic place. When the tour groups have sped away, the souvenir-hawkers yawn and stretch, and life reverts from commerce to comatose. A man inflating his bicycle tyre can attract a crowd of two dozen onlookers. But it's changing.

Some of the changes may be for the worse ? the proliferation of gift shops and budget restaurants where young backpackers haggle over their chicken tikkas ("Six pieces of meat? I want seven!"). Other changes are undoubtedly for the better, particularly the opening of two confidently stylish hotels, designed with Western guests in mind and between them perhaps the two best reasons to come here.

The Malabar House, created from a pair of 300-year-old colonial villas, centres on a courtyard where musicians play during candlelit dinners. The design is an appealing "ethnic-chic", with flamboyant reds and yellows, and the staff are helpful and friendly in a way that other smart hotels don't always manage.

The Brunton Boatyard is a more formal hotel, more restrained. But its open galleries, scattered with planters' chairs, have a calm and airy elegance. At sunset, I sit on a balcony overlooking the straits and watch the comings and goings on the Arabian Sea ? packed ferries, battered old cargo boats, cruise liners strung with fairy lights. It conjures the exotic allure of the name "Cochin" as a commercial crossroads of the East, a place out of Joseph Conrad.

Next morning, I tell Mr Bandey, I'm off to Munnar, a tea-planting centre high enough in Kerala's Cardamom Hills at 1,500m (5,000ft) to be almost, but not quite, a hill station. Has he ever been there? "Practically every weekend for 40 years," he says dryly. "When I used to drive up in the Fifties there were hardly any other cars on the road. If you passed another vehicle, you slowed down to see who it was. If there was a visitor, it was talked about for weeks."

No longer. High production costs have cut profits in South India's tea industry, so some of the planters, and their colleagues in coffee and cardamom, are "diversifying" into the guesthouse business. One of the best known is the Windermere Estate, a "plantation retreat" with clean, simple chalets designed for people who, in the words of Dr John Simon, the genial owner, want "long walks, sandwiches, beer and heavy books".

The road up to Munnar switchbacks, corkscrews and hairpins. "Overtakers ? beware of undertakers," warn the signs. Rolling tea estates give way to misty peaks and forest ridges silhouetted in the setting sun. The air is either keen or mild, so it suited the Scottish planters who built Christ Church, a stocky little kirk transposed from a heathery glen to the Indian hills.

The altar may now be edged with light bulbs, like the mirror in a theatre dressing room, but the Scottish atmosphere lingers. The sexton, John Gnanadhas, talks about Mr Drake and Mr Lawrence, the last English to leave, in 1971. Their haunt was the celebrated High Range Club, grand and elegant and boasting a ballroom that converts into a theatre for the club's dramatic society's annual production.

An official in a blazer invites me to the committee tea before a meeting ? trays of samosas, sandwiches and sponge cake with coconut icing and a glac? cherry on each slice.

As the meeting starts, I retreat to the Men Only bar, with its leather armchairs and animal heads on the walls. Members are represented by hats rather than heads. A corner commemorates the tradition of retiring members literally "hanging up their hats". Their three-dozen sola topis and bush hats are hung with names, initials and dates: C. R. 1911-1948; F. G. G. 1919-1952; D.M.McI. 1921-1967.

It is pure Somerset Maugham. And, to cap it, framed on a door, the club rules stipulate: "Shorts, slippers, sandals and round-necked T-shirts are not permitted on Saturdays. After 7pm gentlemen are expected to be attired in jacket and tie. Ladies should be appropriately dressed." Backpackers wanting to haggle about chicken tikka need not apply.

Courtesy: The Times, March 11, 2006