Asia > India > Karnataka > Coorg > Trekking > Articles > Trekking in Coorg

"I have become rice", said Kristin, holding her bloated stomach and grimacing through the sweat. It's true - in South India, where the cuisine is almost exclusively vegetarian - everything comes with rice. And when you're trekking, as we were, in the high mountains of the Western Ghats, you have to load up on as much as you can. We toiled up the hot hillside, wishing we had porters for our bulging tummies, our skinny, mountain-goat of a guide (whose wraparound shades and greased, 'military cut' hair made him look like some wannabe disco king) skipped along maddeningly, always in front.

But it's hard to be irritable for long in the green mountains of Coorg. Part of the Western Ghats - a small mountain range that runs north-south from Bombay to Cape Cormorin, India's southernmost tip, the Coorgi hills rise up to 8,000ft. You ascend slowly, through successive levels of jungle to high watershed grasslands, which catch the rains that blow in from the Arabian sea and send them back down to the rice-growing valleys below. The hills are still wild, home to elephant, sloth bears and tigers.

"Just there sir," said the guide cheerily, pointing to a bend in the track where the ground fell away steeply in a sort of cliff to the forest below:

"My friend, getting drunk, meeting elephant, thrown overwards. Yes - positively dying, he did!"

Fortunately the elephants don't come out in the day. Much. Anyway, the guide - as his job dictated - walked first into any dense thickets. And by the time we had reached the first peak of the day (we were to climb four on this, the second day of our three-day trek), the heart-stopping views out over the wide spaces to the distant blue of the Indian Ocean erased any fear of giant fauna. At least, the guide claimed that the blue haze was the Indian Ocean. Up there in the space and silence and champagne air, I didn't care. Even better, Kristin and I had digested the rice. We were even becoming hungry again.

Coorg is unknown to most India-philes. Although Dervla Murphy's written one of her numberless books about the place (On a Shoestring to Coorg), it has yet, thank God, to be discovered by the backpacker circuit. For the moment, it is protected by the relative hassle of getting there. To reach Coorg, we had taken a short flight south from Bombay to Bangalore, then an overnight bus west from Bangalore to Madikeri, Coorg's regional capital, and finally a jeep up to the foot of the mountains and from where we foot-slogged it for the next three days. But what magic there is in those forested hills. A night in a jungle temple under the stars, served rice by the priests while the jungle sang and screeched its night-song. A second night in a ruined palace, being served (rice) by the son of the local landowner while monkeys scampered through the stonework above us and paradise fly-catchers - gaudily coloured birds - darted among the trees. Hiking through stands of wild cardamom, glades scented with lemon-grass, watching a heavily-antlered sambar stag dip its head to drink at a lake where the trees gave way to high meadows. Coorg is Kipling's India still. You just have to really like rice.

Articles

• More from Rupert Isaacson
• More on the same theme