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Happy in a home stay

Catch glimpses of Coorgi culture at the "Home Stay" estates

SYLVAN SURROUNDINGS View of a home stay

Home stay can be romantic. Even exotic. Just choose a "home" set in the middle of a coffee plantation in the lush mountainsides of Coorg in Karnataka. Some 40-odd planters have opened their old homestead doors to paying guests.

Novelty

Call it the idea of the millennium. Finding two of the traditional three bedrooms in their Kodagu villas lying vacant, planters must have asked themselves: why not put them to profitable use? They had to, it seems. Whenever coffee prices slumped or crops failed there was no other source of income.

Planters were getting into a debt trap, and were forced to sell timber. That's when the wives pitched in with help.

For a certain sum, you get to use a bedroom and a living/dining room in a Kerala-style house, with breakfast thrown in. For an extra sum, you'll get the other meals. You may/may not get to see the owners - some of them live in cities. But you sure will bump into the people occupying the other room, like it or not.

Sandbanks is different. Home stay it is, with guesthouses separated.

There are only two, each with two bedrooms, baths and a lounge. The more recent one, the Coffee House has furniture made of old coffee plants and a lovely verandah in front. Each guesthouse has its own dining "hut" - thatched roof, fans, lights, furniture and a tip box.

"Most of the guests want privacy," say Sapna and Micky who own the place, "they don't want to mix at all".

The estate looks like the letter C. River Cauvery lazily hugs the covered part and the open mouth overlooks the wooded Kodagu hills. The river runs dry sometimes creating sandbanks. The guesthouses lie in the shadows of silver oaks, citruses and coconuts.

There is a play area for kids and lots of space to run around. In the twenty minutes it takes for the bank-walk, you'll catch geese feeding, hoopoes, wagtails, red-breasted pies and kingfishers flitting in and out. Bliss. Especially during monsoons.

But you're itching to get to the hills. The hosts will take you to see coffee bushes, and through the hills to waterfalls, rivers and temples. Fishing and boating are add-ons. On the way, they will tell you about Coorgi traditions, their way of life, planter association activities (ask about the inter-family hockey matches), coffee curing, honey gathering and the vanishing sandalwood trees. "Coffee plants need shade and that's the sole reason the timber has survived on these hills," says Micky. "Else the whole area would have been ravaged long ago."

Coorgi traditions

Insist on Coorgi food like Akki rotis with banana jam and soft rice cakes with grated coconut. Over glasses of passion fruit juice, the hosts will narrate hilly tales of leopard and elephant menace, fluctuating coffee prices, what guests feel about the place.

"Won't build more guesthouses," says Sapna. "I believe in personal touch." She smiles. "Women borrow my saris to try wearing it the Coorgi way."

Hooked? Go to Madikeri from Bengaluru and ask travel agents for "Home Stay" estates. The tariff is upwards of Rs.1500 for B & B so make sure you get your money's worth.

Also be prepared for a drive on a backbreaking three-kilometre stretch of sandy tracks before you reach the "coffee houses". You could log on to www.sand-banks.com as a first step.

Or call 08274 - 252130/ 264130.

GEETA PADMANABHAN

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