Coorg

Dusk sets the insects going and they hold one unbroken note until light; the rain, when it comes, lands on the canopy seconds before it reaches you. Mornings in the coffee country are the opposite — cold enough for a jacket, the drying yards already being raked by someone who has been up for hours. By four the mist is back up the valley and the far ridge goes out.

Coorg is a hill district that ended up growing a third of India's coffee more or less by accident: the British planted the first estate at Siddapura in 1854, every household in Kodagu had followed within a generation, and the result is four thousand square kilometres of the Western Ghats where the forest was never cleared — it was farmed underneath. Shade coffee grows below native canopy, pepper goes up the trunks, cardamom sits in the wet folds, and the whole of it drains into the Cauvery, which rises here at Talakaveri and does not stop until the Bay of Bengal. The people are Kodavas, a martial community with their own language, their own clan system, their own food and no particular resemblance to anyone around them. It rains from June to September in a way that has to be seen. And for about a week in late February the coffee blossoms all at once, white to the horizon, and the smell reaches the road.