Vagamon

Nobody warns you that Kerala has a place where you’ll want a jacket. We’d spent two weeks sweating through Kochi and the backwaters before driving up into the Idukki hills toward Vagamon, and somewhere around 3,500 feet the windows started fogging and Lia laughed and said “is that cold?” like it was a foreign concept, which after Mexico and lowland India, it kind of was for both of us.

Vagamon doesn’t have a single obvious center — it’s more a scattering of meadows, pine plantations, and tea estates spread across three linked hills, which meant we spent our two days there mostly driving between viewpoints and getting out to walk whenever something looked worth it. The pine forest near Kurisumala was the one that actually surprised me: rows of trees planted decades ago by Christian missionaries, tall and straight and oddly silent, the ground carpeted in dry needles that muffled our footsteps completely. It didn’t feel like India. It felt, weirdly, like a forest outside Grenoble, and I stood there for a minute just trying to place why that unsettled me a little.

The meadows are the real draw, though, and they’re best early — we got up before six to catch Vagamon before the day-trip buses from Kottayam and Kumily arrived, and had the rolling grass hills almost entirely to ourselves, cows grazing loose, a shepherd in the distance who didn’t seem to register us at all. Clouds move fast up there; you can watch a hillside disappear into fog and reappear in the space of a few minutes, which made for a strange, slightly disorienting kind of beauty — every time the mist cleared it was like the landscape had been reset.

We stayed at a small homestay run by a couple who grew their own pepper and cardamom on a slope behind the house, and the woman who ran it, Susan, insisted on making us black tea with crushed cardamom pods each morning that I still think about, strong enough to wake you up through the fog. There’s a paragliding operation near one of the meadows too — I didn’t do it, heights and I have an understanding — but I watched a few people launch off the ridge and drift out over the valley, and it looked like exactly the kind of thing you’d regret not trying, which is a sentence I say about a lot of things and rarely act on.

When to go: September through February, when the monsoon has passed and the air stays cool and clear enough to actually see the meadows instead of just the fog rolling over them.