Ooty & Coorg — Two Hill Stations, No City

From Coimbatore through Mettupalayam and up the hairpins, which is under three hours but feels like a change of country — plains heat at the bottom, and eucalyptus and open downland at the top. Ooty is at about 2,240 m and the first afternoon is deliberately unscheduled: the lake, the Charing Cross end of town and the church on the rise are all walkable, and the body adjusts to the temperature faster if it is not being driven anywhere.

Doddabetta first for the view, which closes in as the day warms. The Botanical Gardens below Elk Hill afterwards — planted in 1848 and worth an unhurried hour rather than a photograph. The middle of the day drops to Coonoor on the toy train where seats are available, and the afternoon is a working tea estate and factory: the leaf comes in, is withered, rolled, oxidised and graded, and the difference between the grades stops being an abstraction once you have seen it. Sim's Park or Lamb's Rock to finish.

Pykara in the morning — the lake and the falls on the Mysuru road, which are quieter than anything in town and are the last of the Nilgiris you will see. Then the long transfer west: down through Gudalur, across Mudumalai and up into Kodagu by the Nagarhole boundary. Around 250 km and the better part of six hours, through forest for a good deal of it, so the animals on the verges are part of the day. Into Madikeri in the late afternoon with nothing else asked of it.

The estate walk in the cool of the morning, through arabica grown under a shade canopy with pepper vines on the trunks and cardamom in the wet corners — a working landscape rather than a display, and different in every month of the year. Abbey Falls after it. The afternoon climbs the valley to Bhagamandala and Talacauvery, where the Kaveri rises below Brahmagiri and the steps above the tank look west toward the coast on a clear day. Raja's Seat at sunset, which is where the town goes.

Down to Dubare on the Kaveri first if the morning allows, then east out of the plantations. Namdroling Monastery at Bylakuppe is on the road and is the right last stop — a Tibetan settlement established in 1961, with a temple hall holding three gilded figures eighteen metres high and several thousand resident monks and nuns. Bangalore is around four hours beyond it, which makes an evening flight comfortable.