South India Wildlife: Bandipur to the Backwaters

Met at the airport and driven to your hotel in Bengaluru — Bangalore until 2014, and still Bangalore to many who live here. After a rest, the city’s two landmarks. Lalbagh, 240 acres of botanical garden begun by Hyder Ali in 1760 and finished by his son Tipu Sultan, is planted with trees from across the tropics and keeps a Victorian glasshouse at its heart. Then the Vidhana Soudha, the vast granite home of Karnataka’s legislature and secretariat, finished in 1956.

The morning in Mysore, the city of the Wodeyar maharajas. The Mysore Palace — Amba Vilas — was built between 1897 and 1912 in the Indo-Saracenic style, after fire destroyed the old wooden palace: carved doors, the stained-glass ceiling of the marriage hall, and the golden throne brought out each year for Dasara. The art gallery in the Jaganmohan Palace holds paintings by Raja Ravi Varma among its ceramics, sandalwood, ivory and old musical instruments; and St Philomena’s Church raises neo-Gothic spires modelled on Cologne Cathedral. In the afternoon, south to Bandipur National Park, and your resort on the edge of the forest.

Bandipur runs straight into Mudumalai National Park, on the Tamil Nadu side of the border, where the Moyar river cuts through the forest and the Nilgiri hills rise behind. Today you drive into it: another tiger reserve and part of the same forest, where elephants, gaur, chital, sambar and leopards move freely between the states, and more than two hundred kinds of bird have been counted. Back to Bandipur for lunch. The afternoon is yours — rest, sit out with binoculars, or join one of the resort’s own activities.

The Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary is the Kerala corner of the same great forest: it borders Bandipur and Nagarhole in Karnataka and Mudumalai in Tamil Nadu, and the animals migrate along the corridor between them with the seasons. It has four ranges, and today you go into Muthanga, in the south-east, by jeep with a forest department guide.

Moist and dry deciduous forest, with patches of semi-evergreen, holds elephants above all — Muthanga is known for them — with gaur, chital, sambar and wild boar, and tigers and leopards that are seldom seen. The rest of the day is at leisure at the resort.

Back up into the Western Ghats to Munnar, some 1,500 metres high, where three mountain streams meet — the name is said to mean ‘three rivers’. The British made it a hill station and planted the hills with tea in the late nineteenth century, and the estates still run unbroken to the skyline, clipped low and even, with silver oaks for shade. Check in and spend the rest of the day as you like: a walk along the estate roads, or tea on the verandah as the mist comes in.

South through the Cardamom Hills to Thekkady, the town at the gate of the Periyar Tiger Reserve, and your hotel. In the afternoon, a walk through a spice plantation. Cardamom hides its small pale flowers at the very foot of the plant; pepper vines climb the shade trees; cinnamon, clove and nutmeg grow alongside, and the air smells of all of them. Your guide will show you how each is picked and dried.

A short drive to Alappuzha — Alleppey, as it is also called — to board your houseboat: a kettuvallam, the long, thatched rice barge of the backwaters, fitted out with bedrooms and a deck. All day you drift along the canals and across open water, past paddy fields that lie below sea level, coconut palms, churches and temples, ducks herded along the banks, and villages that face the water. Every meal is cooked on board, with fish from the lake. In the evening the boat moors, and you can take a bicycle along the village paths. The night is spent on board.