Endless Greens

At Wayanad Wild, Latha Anantharaman gets a taste of spring in the rainforest. From bluebottle butterflies, giant squirrels and tuskers to ghosts, the jungle here is home to many a wild dweller.

- Latha Anantharaman

The northern regions of Kerala are known for their forbidding wilderness, warriors and revolutionaries. The name Wayanad means the land of paddy fields, but you can’t enter this district without feeling the drama of the forest. The slopes are steeper, the trees taller, the vines thicker and more tangled than we see elsewhere in Kerala. About fifteen years ago, the Wayanad region opened up for luxury tourism, and the fragile forest has so far seemed robust enough to withstand it.

Wayanad Wild, a new resort that was soft-launched by CGH Earth this January, is built and run with the same sensitivity as the group’s other resorts, with clusters of rooms perched on a slope. When you walk out onto the balcony, you find yourself looking at the higher branches of trees further down the slope. The air is cool here at an altitude of 2,900 feet above sea level, and even in March a light sweater is welcome in the mornings and evenings. Salvaged ship wood and bamboo accessories lend some warmth to the sleek steel structures; there is comfort here without ostentation.

At this stage, 22 rooms out of the planned 40 are ready. It’s that time of the year when the hilly landscape is scented with the blooms of coffee bushes and coloured with blushing datura. The resort covers just over 12 acres but it touches the buffer zone of a forest reserve, so the greens appear infinite. In the evenings, once the birds have fluttered back to their nests, a campfire is lit and there is music in the air. On my first evening, the men and women who work at the resort sang a Malayalam song as we all sat by the fire, while a young Israeli guest plucked her ukulele.