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Somewhere between 3,500 and 4,000 ft above sea level in the southern Indian state of Kerala there's a bedroom that has been constructed a further 87ft above the ground. It's a bedroom with a wrap-around balcony, a bathroom, and a unparalleled view across the misty and mystical rainforest-clad Wynad Hills. Its host is a 200-year-old banyan tree, and it must have one of the more unusual hotel lifts in the world; instead of pressing a call-button you turn a wooden tap - and then wait for ten minutes while a black bag fills with water.

Even getting to this treehouse - for that is what it is - can be a fairly robust experience. The nearest transport hub is Calicut, with rail and domestic flight connections, from where the tortuous Ooty road climbs 65km up frowning hills through cardamom, rubber, ginger, betel-nut, coffee and tea plantations, and every hairpin seems to have a bus stuck in its throat. The last 30 minutes is off-road in a four-wheel drive, where leopards and elephant are sometimes caught in the headlights. After all that, being hauled up 87ft through darkness in an ethnic lazy Susan, passing a water-filled counterweight half way up, doesn't seem such an unusual thing to do.

The Green Magic Treehouses are the creation of the man who brought the Kettuvallom houseboats to the Kerala backwaters, Babu Varghese, and you'd have to travel to Hawaii or Australia to find anything remotely similar.

Varghese took three years to find a suitable site for his idea, and he chose to build in banyan trees because of their size and their religious connections; Lord Buddha attained enlightenment sitting under a banyan, but it can also be a pretty enlightening experience sitting at 87 ft, and you're unlikely to encounter more oxygen-rich air-conditioning than up in the rainforest canopy.

There are, in fact, about to be three treehouses. The original single-decker towers over the resort's restaurant, its river, elephant bathing pool and cottages; the second is a double-decker with two bedrooms and two bathrooms, ten minutes' walk away on a hillside reached by a hanging walkway, with the third, a triple decker, nearing completion nearby.

There is something of a local tradition at work here. Tribes in the Wynad used to regularly build treehouses to escape from predators and watch over their agricultural land. The Green Magic treehouses were built using their expertise, but following Varghese's design.

The timbers are jungle jackfruit, the lashings are coir rope, the walls are bamboo matting and roofs are local thatch. Each bedroom has its own ensuite bathroom and shower, with herbal powders provided instead of soaps: Vaka (made from roots) for the body, Shikaki (made from leaves) for hair, and red sandalwood and jungle turmeric, mixed, for the face. It feels like washing yourself with earth, but it works.

You wouldn't be human if you didn't feel some sensation of alarm initially, especially when the tree shifts slightly in the night breeze and bursting seed pods sound like gunfire. It's like being on the bridge of a ship of the forest, with a slight list to starboard and with nothing but the stars way up above and the gentle glow of paraffin lamps way down below.

The bedroom can be curtained all round, but why seal yourself off from a 360 degree sunrise? You need to be able to smell the forest floor warming up while still in bed, to listen to the Malabar Whistling Bird close at hand and the black monkeys further away. You only need to stir to retrieve the coffee tray, which has come up in the lift by itself.

Breakfast is fruit, omelette, ghee, toast and baked banana - although you have to shout, "cuckoo" from the treetops to get down to eat it. The kitchen uses gober gas made on site from cow dung, and serves its authentic Keralan vegetarian food in the authentic way - on banana leaves and with no knife or fork. Many ingredients are drawn from the organic garden in a clearing up the hill; onion, tomato, snake gourd, ladies fingers, tapioca, ginger and cucumber, cooked with turmeric, coconut, cardamom, coriander and chili.

There's such an overwhelming sense of place that what you actually do while staying at Green Magic is a rather secondary consideration - although if you're not in your treehouse at sunset you will miss one of nature's finest shows. Up on the balcony, time just slips past. I found it a very suitable place to read A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth's 1,400-page meander through Indian society, looking up occasionally to check on the position of the sun, the thickness of the mist, and to make sure the Malabar squirrels weren't eating my socks.

At ground level - almost - I tried a brief slide around on the shoulders of Ammu the elephant, and I'm not sure who was more alarmed at the prospect of going downhill, her or me.

More entertaining was watching Ammu have her bath. Initially painfully reluctant to set herself down in the cold water, there was no mistaking the ecstasy in the heavy breathing as her mahout set to, scrubbing her back with a coconut husk and using his heel to clean in her ears.

In this dense forest, the resort doesn't like guests wandering off without an escort; miss the path and you could be gone forever. Shibu took me for an hour's walk uphill to a cloud-crowned rock with a breath-stopping two-valley view. We stopped en route to pick a freshwater crab out of the stream and to admire dragonflies and butterflies, including the Common Bluebottle and the appropriately named Hill Jezebel.

I wasn't quite so pleased to see the other wildlife, but it seemed very pleased to see me. Shibu had provided me with anti-leech galoshes and a stick with a bag of salt, and by God they were necessary. You could see the little blighters all over the path wherever it dipped out of the sun and it was hard not to go into a frenzied dance as they started to climb up my boots.

"Don't stop", Shibu kept warning me; "if you stop, you get more."

By the time we finally got to the rock, there were 22 leeches resident in my boots, but none had penetrated the galoshes.

Leeches aside, the visitors to the treehouses were a mix of the familiar and the exotic. Two English couples were in residence when I arrived, and when I left the other guests were two Indian film stars of great jollity and enormous girth. If the infrastructure could cope with them, then it could cope with anybody.

Overall, this is a place for the sophisticated in search of the simple; it's a place where the best creativity of nature meets the ingenuity of man, and, as it says in the Green Magic visitors' book, God lives on the 7th floor.

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