Escaping the 'plantationocene' 🌱
Looking beyond conventional plantation life at these wild Knowhere Travel estates, sipping coffee, and exploring Coorg. Plus, updates from the Binsar Forest Trail.
Is there any wilderness left to save? When mankind has cultivated over 38% of the earth’s land surface, and trod on every inch of it as well, is there anything left to the wild? Or are humans one with wilderness, and therefore responsible for its protection. There are numerous philosophical arguments that seek to build this idea of pure, unadulterated wilderness. It almost seems like the two homestays we recently visited on recce in Coorg this month wants to answer these questions.
At Knowhere Travel, we believe it’s really important to visit all the spaces we recommend on our website. Experiencing a space is the ONLY way we know what to tell our guests - it’s more granular than Googling or depending on a few photos and videos of the space. Cameras often cannot capture the essence of a place and as we continue to grow as a team, we’ve had to do these ‘recces’ so that the rest of the team can look at a space with new eyes and provide us with new perspectives.
So this is why we ended up visiting two of our spaces in Coorg - The Oasis and Estate of Mind. While we list them as homestays, it is really important for us to communicate that they are WAY MORE THAN THAT. These two places are Concepts with a capital C right in the heart of one of the most beautiful places in the world - Coorg.
Just two ladies adventuring in the Ghats
Small aside: We’ve expanded our team! We’re thrilled to be joined by Zami, Dev, and Aatish, all helping build this growing network of deep explorers and responsible travellers. While two of us were leading our walking holidays in Binsar and Saryu in Uttarakhand, two of us headed to the coffee plantations of Kodagu.
Getting lost
We took the Mangalore highway to get there, making a late breakfast stop in Nelamangala (thanks to some delays, namely: oversleeping) and ended up getting lost a few minutes from our new space, The Linger Farm, further west from Madikeri. (We’ll talk about this beautiful homestay in more detail when we launch later this week - so stay tuned).
As we got closer and the roads became narrower, it started pouring. Rains in November are a new development, and we were surprised to experience such a relentless monsoon during our entire week in Coorg. At one point, it rained so much that we couldn’t see the road, so we stopped and made necessary calls. The team at our first space was there to help out immediately - Harish and Sunil came to our rescue and guided us to the farm while all of us struggled with little to no visibility.
The Stays
The two days spent here were super comfortable - it was a great place to start before venturing into ‘wilder’ spaces. We had a lovely suite to ourselves with a loft bed as well (so Enid Blyton) and a pretty garden with a view of the farm and the hills. We ate our weight in organic rice grown on site, delectable pandi curry, an assortment of other gravies and palyas and more. Breakfasts were steaming dosas and incredible chutneys, and of course, the coffee didn’t stop.
The Linger Farm
With our meals we had books to pour over, and we went with Harish on a couple of lovely little trails that led to the Kaveri river streams. Honestly, the best part of The Linger Farm was that we were able to be perfectly at peace within the estate, doing absolutely nothing. With Wi-Fi in every room, we were able to catch up on work, but with a view of lush, green landscapes that looked even more verdant after rainfall. Sunbirds chirped whenever the sun came out and flitted between the trees, taking a special liking to the powder puffs that decorated the garden.
Estate of Mind
With our stomachs full of pandi curry and rice balls, coffee and dosas, we made our way closer to Madikeri where we went to stay at the fabulous estate run by Anna and Abhishek. Yes, there’s a homestay at which you can park yourselves for a bit, but more than anything, it’s a concept. And within this concept, there’s so much effort and work that has gone into creating a habitat that welcomes shiny little frogs, snakes, birds, insects, moths, butterflies, orchids, and mooooore.
Abhishek took us on walks around the estate, showing us the bunds and the former paddy fields that are now almost wetlands, attracting a rich diversity of creatures that routinely have to shut shop and leave every time an estate douses their land in pesticides and fertilisers. In the summers, Abhishek told us, the family spends a portion of their mornings taking a dip in a large natural pool, with Girdon’s Bazas and racket-tailed drongos flying overhead.
Estate of Mind produces coffee, cardamom, pepper, avocados, vanilla, tea, and more, organically. Processing is done in-house, and other estates come to use these facilities as well. We dined on very interesting (and delicious) vegetarian food that inventively utilised ingredients from the estate itself. Beetroot and spinach made a hearty salad, and chow chow was used in ways we’d never seen.
One of the best walks was when Abhishek took us around the homestay area at night. He spoke about his collection of rare orchids with love and tenderness, gently shining a light on tiny shoots and stems. A tiny pond near his own cottage was populated by hundreds of frogs - we saw Malabar Gliding Frogs sitting near their much rarer cousins, the Small Tree Frogs. At one point, Abhishek excitedly showed us the caterpillar of an Atlas moth, a pastel blue and unmistakeable under torch light.
We were sad to leave all our new friends the next day, but before we drove off, we had to make a pilgrimage to the shining jewel of Estate of Mind (as if it needed anymore) - an ancient Champaca tree. Some say it’s over 800 years old. We were told that a Champaca tree researcher had visited a while before and proclaimed it was over 2000 years old - no matter what it was, we stopped breathing the moment we laid eyes on the tree.
The neighbouring estate, sadly, did not seem to understand the point of keeping the tree around, and it has become a practice for Abhishek and Anna to pay their neighbours a sum of 10000 rupees every year so that he doesn’t lop off any branches. Yes, attitudes like this still exist and so prevalently, that it’s a testament to the long line of owners of this estate that the tree still stands strong, with roots stretching across many other estates around.
The Oasis
Things were getting wilder and wilder as we left Estate of Mind the next day (after checking our feet for leeches) and drove to the next Concept - Sujata and Anurag’s plantation, not 30 minutes from Abhishek’s home. Sprawled across four valleys, Estate of Mind was rescued by this couple over 27 years ago. With their lovely team on site - including Ravi and Muthu and their families - Sujata and Anurag have created nothing short of magic from an abandoned plantation site.
Here, we were taken to the top of the estate, and housed in a comfortable mud house with a drongo painted on the front. To walk to the dining area from the cottage took a good ten minutes, through pathways made of roots and rocks. Sujata’s daughter, Maya gave us a tour of two of the valleys. She explained how the family has restored the balance between wildlife and cultivation, making this plantation a fantastic case study on the contributions of what most agriculturists call ‘pests’.
From our visit, one of the most interesting stories was about the work Maya is doing in the landslide-affected portions of the estate. After 2018, when all the magical humus was washed away in the rains, Maya and her family have been working diligently to bring back those patches to life by growing a food forest.
Staying at The Oasis and Estate of Mind can change the way you look at plantation culture - the ‘plantationocene’ - and open your mind to the possibility of improving and nurturing your relationship with nature.
As we said earlier, we like to visit our spaces and understand them well because when we send you to a Knowhere Travel space, you’re not just going to stay in a room. You’re going on a journey of discovery, and more often than not, it will lead to discovery of the self………
Other updates
Sorry but we’re not done talking about the stuff we’ve been doing this month!
Half our team is still in Uttarakhand leading our group holidays in Saryu and Binsar. We’ve had over three group walks in the Binsar Wildlife Sanctuary, with guests of all ages enjoying the hospitality of the charming hamlets that reside within. Check out some photos from the trip:
We had a small family join us for Sweet Valley Crossing, our walking holiday a little closer to the Himalaya. During their trip, they met a member of the Anwal community, along with thousands of sheep, making its way to the bugyals.