Reserve a stay in the Coorg hills for a week, three weeks or a season

Reserve a stay in the Coorg hills and what you are given is a single address: a stone bungalow on a working coffee estate in Kodagu, southern Karnataka, two bedrooms, a veranda running the length of the front, and a kitchen with somebody in it from six in the morning. Coffee here is grown under trees rather than out in the open, so what you walk into is not a field but a wood with rows underneath it, silver oak and jackfruit overhead, pepper vines wound up the trunks, and the coffee itself at chest height in the shade.

The length is the first thing we need from you, because up here the length changes what you are buying and not only how much of it. The figure per night comes down as the stay gets longer, and the reason is mechanical rather than generous: a room held for eight weeks is not stripped, cleaned and let again every Saturday, and a kitchen cooking for the same two people for two months orders in a different way from one cooking for a new pair each week. Seven nights works out at $355 a night. Twenty one nights sits a little under $269. Fifty six nights is $212.

The estate is 40 minutes off the main road, six hours from Bengaluru in daylight and about four up from the coast when the ghat road is dry, and it holds one party at a time. Costing the exact weeks you name takes two to four working days, because the estate answers first and it answers around the picking.

What the coffee year does to the house you are sitting in

Nothing on this estate is arranged for looking at, and the year runs on the crop. Arabica is picked by hand from the middle of November to the end of January, and because shade ripens fruit unevenly the same block is gone over four or five times rather than cleared in one pass. Robusta follows into March. What comes off the trees goes to the pulping shed the same evening and then out onto the drying yard in front of the house, where it is raked into lines twice a day and pushed under cover when the sky closes. From the veranda that is a scraping sound at seven in the morning and again at three in the afternoon.

Pepper is picked off the same shade trees from December into February and dries on mats until it rattles. Cardamom sits in the wetter corners of the estate. The small loose skinned oranges the district still grows in patches are on the trees through December, and the ones that reach the kitchen are the ones that fell.

The blossom is the odd event of the year. After the first real rain of March, usually in the last ten days of the month, the hillside flowers white inside about a week and holds it for two or three days. The smell reaches the veranda and then it is finished for another year. The rain decides the date and the estate knows a day or two ahead, which is not enough notice to book a flight around.

Then the rain proper, which owns four months. About 100 inches falls here in a year and two thirds of it comes in June, July and August. In the heaviest fortnight it rains for nine days without a clear hour. The first big rains push bamboo shoot and wild mushrooms into the kitchen for a few weeks and then that is over too. Water in the upper houses is shut off for a couple of hours most afternoons in April. A man brings bread up from the village bakery on a scooter three mornings a week and is done by half past seven. The bus down to the valley floor runs on school days.

Seven nights, twenty one nights, fifty six

A week is one pass at the place. You get a Friday market in Madikeri, a climb up Tadiandamol at 5,735 feet and about three hours above the road end, a run out to Bhagamandala and the spring on the ridge above it, and two or three mornings out in a block while it is being picked. You see the crop at one stage of its year, whichever stage your dates happened to land on. That is a real thing to have seen and for most people it is the correct amount. You go back down knowing what the shade looks like from underneath it.

Twenty one nights is where the second week stops resembling the first. The picking moves to another block. Fruit that was red on the tree the day you came in is spread out on the drying yard by the time you leave, and you were there for the middle of that, which is the part nobody photographs. Pepper strings come down in what would be your fourth week if you arrived in November. The kitchen stops asking what you would like and starts telling you what there is, which is the better arrangement for everybody. You work out that the bus only goes down on school days, so Sunday is a walking day whether or not you meant it to be, and you work out which of the two shops in the village grinds coffee the way you want it. Three weeks is also long enough to lose four days to rain and not mind.

Fifty six nights is a different purchase and we would rather say so than let you find out. Somewhere in the third or fourth week the estate quietly stops treating you as a visitor. The laundry is no longer counted. The man on the scooter puts two loaves aside without being asked. The man weighing the pickers' baskets at the end of the day will hand you the chalk if you are standing there anyway. You see one crop through from green fruit to stacked sacks. You will pick up perhaps thirty words of Kodava, use most of them wrong, and be corrected at the table by people who find it funny. A road will wash out and you will wait two days for it. The rest of a season is ordinary: reading on a veranda while it rains, walking the same four miles of estate road, rice at one and again at eight.

Season dates fall into two windows and they are not versions of each other. From the first week of November to the last week of December puts you inside the harvest and inside Puthari at the full moon, with dry mornings and a working yard. From the middle of June to the middle of August puts you inside the rain, the green, the mushrooms and the fog, with a stove and a great deal of reading. Pick the one you actually want rather than the one that sounds better written down.

The road up, the bill, and who holds the stay

Slow Latitudes Bookings LLC operates under the name Slow Latitudes. The office is at 9422 Common Street, Suite 2, Baton Rouge, LA 70809, in East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana, and nothing that carries a traveller or houses one is owned at that address. What happens here is that we take your dates, put them to the company that runs the estate house and its kitchen, and come back to you in writing with a figure and a list of what it covers. That company holds the stay under a contract of its own and bills you directly for it. This office takes no money from you at any stage, in any form.

You buy the flight. Nothing with wings appears on a price from here, and no part of getting you from the American South to the coast of Karnataka is ours to arrange. Entry paperwork works the same way: it sits between you and the authority that issues it, we do not advise on it, and the length of the stay you choose does not change that.

The road transfer at each end is in the price and is driven by the estate's own man, who has done the ghat for years and will pull over at the top of it if you want to look at what you just came up. Tell bookings@slowlatitudes.com three things: the dates you are considering, the length you want, and how many of you there are. If you would rather say it out loud, call +1 (225) 766-2418. Requests are answered within one business day, and the costed quote follows in two to four working days once the estate has answered. If anything on this page has gone stale or is simply wrong, corrections@slowlatitudes.com reaches the person who fixes it.