Imagine a resort where less is really more. No air-conditioning or television or nightclubs. Just a mirror, held up to an age old culture and a living harmony. This is the tribal village, reborn for the modern traveller.

Wait for a clear, clear day.

Then, wherever you might be in God's own country, just look high to the east, above and beyond the paddy fields and the palm tops. Pitched and standing like pavilions against the horizon will be rows of faint blue smudges, fading into the sky.

These are the highlands of Kerala, and they are another world.

A few hours inland from the coast are places of cool mists and sun-dappled, silent valleys, home to vast plantations of teak, cardamom, tea, rubber and coffee.

Home also, to an astonishing biodiversity, preserved today in some fine wildlife sanctuaries.

For centuries, tribal cultures built their own unique habitats in these mountains. Empires ebbed and flowed across the plains, but they left the Mannans and the Ooralies untouched. Here continued an ancient wisdom, a way of living that sustained itself from nature, yet respected it and left it uncorrupted.