Coorg Coffee Country

About this pack

A 4-day mid-range trip to Madikeri, India, taking in Abbey Falls, Raja's Seat viewpoint, Dubare Elephant Camp and Namdroling Monastery.

Inside the Coorg Coffee Country trip

Coorg Coffee Country opens at Abbey Falls, a waterfall on the upper reaches of the river Kaveri about 8 kilometres from Madikeri in Kodagu district, set among private coffee plantations and spice estates threaded with pepper vines. Once known as Jessi Falls, after a British officer's daughter, at a time when the surrounding land was still thick jungle, the falls were later discovered and developed by Neravanda B. Nanaiah, who purchased the site from the government and converted the surrounding land into the coffee and spice plantation that still frames the waterfall today; a hanging bridge built opposite the falls gives visitors a closer view of the flow, heaviest during the monsoon season. The falls sit roughly 122 kilometres from Mysore and 268 kilometres from Bangalore, in the Western Ghats landscape of Kodagu that has made the district one of Karnataka's principal coffee-growing regions, its plantations shaded by silver oak and areca alongside the coffee bushes and pepper vines that now surround the water.

From the falls the route climbs to Raja's Seat, a viewpoint in the heart of Madikeri set within a garden known as Gandhi Mantap, built from brick and mortar as a small structure of four pillars bridged by arches. The site takes its name from its use by the kings and queens of Kodagu, who ruled the region for more than two centuries between 1600 and 1834 and favoured this high ground overlooking the western cliffs and valleys as a place of recreation and reflection at sunset. Each year on 30 January, the anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi's assassination, Coorg observes Sarvodaya Diwas here with a procession carrying an urn of Gandhi's ashes to the viewpoint, followed by readings from the Bhagavad Gita, the Quran and the Bible and a shared moment of silence. Raja's Seat remains one of Madikeri's principal gathering points at sunset, its position on high ground giving an open view across the cliffs and coffee-covered valleys that fall away to the west of the town.

The trail continues to Dubare, a forest camp on the banks of the Kaveri in Kodagu district, long used as a training and care camp for domesticated elephants that work in the region's forest department. Set among the same river system that also carries water past Abbey Falls, Dubare's riverside setting has made it a working camp where visitors can observe the daily routines of the elephants housed there, from bathing to feeding, against the backdrop of Kodagu's forested hills. The camp lies within reach of nearby Kushalanagar and the Nisargadhama river-island park, both linked to the same stretch of the Kaveri as it winds through the district on its way further into Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

The route closes at Namdroling Monastery in Bylakuppe, the largest teaching centre of the Nyingma lineage of Tibetan Buddhism anywhere in the world, home to a sangha community of more than five thousand monks and nuns. Founded in 1963 by the 3rd Drubwang Padma Norbu Rinpoche, the 11th throneholder of the Palyul lineage, following his escape from Tibet after the 1957 arrest of Palyul's then head, the monastery began as a simple bamboo temple covering less than 100 square feet before growing, on land granted by the Indian government for Tibetan resettlement, into the sprawling complex known today for the golden-roofed Padmasambhava Buddhist Vihara, inaugurated in 1999 with space for several thousand monks — a serene, gold-lit close to a route that has already carried the traveller through waterfalls, a royal viewpoint and a riverside elephant camp in the hills of Coorg.

• Abbey Falls — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Raja's Seat — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Dubare — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Namdroling Monastery — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Text adapted from the linked articles under CC BY-SA 4.0; edited for length.

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