Coorg

Coorg — officially Kodagu — is a hill district in the Western Ghats that has maintained its cultural distinctiveness so successfully that its people, the Kodavas, still speak a language with no script, cook a cuisine with no restaurant equivalent, and produce more Indian Army officers per capita than any other community in the country.

The Kodava people are the most specific example in India of a community so self-defined by its own internal logic that the surrounding culture has not diluted but merely surrounded it. Their food — pork cooked with freshly roasted spices, rice preparation called kooliputtoo steamed in bamboo, fish from the Kaveri prepared with raw mango — is produced in family kitchens and not available in restaurants because the Kodavas do not consider it appropriate to commercialise a domestic practice.

The coffee estates of Coorg are where 60 percent of India's coffee is grown — Arabica at higher elevation, Robusta below — on estates in production since the British introduced the crop in the 1840s. The landscape of a working coffee estate in the post-monsoon months of October and November, when the berries are ripe and the air smells of coffee and cardamom, is one of the most sensory environments in India.

Places to Visit in Coorg

• Abbey Falls
• Raja's Seat
• Coffee estates
• Talacauvery

Things to Do in Coorg

• Coffee plantation tours
• Waterfall visits
• Kodava cuisine tasting