If this is your first trip to Kerala, the route below is the one we would gently put a hand on your shoulder and recommend. It moves through four quietly different worlds — a port city on the Arabian Sea, a hill station in the clouds, a spice-and-wildlife reserve, and the backwaters that gave Kerala its postcard — and it asks nothing more strenuous of you than a willingness to wake up early once or twice.
It is a week. You can stretch it to ten days; you can shorten it to five. We have walked it more times than we can count, and what follows is the version we'd send a friend on.
Nights 1 – 3 · Fort Kochi
Begin in Fort Kochi, the old colonial quarter on a peninsula at the mouth of the harbour. It is the gentlest possible introduction to Kerala — walkable, coffee-rich, scaled for strolling — and it gives you time to recover from the flight before anything more demanding begins.
Spend a morning wandering between St Francis Church (the oldest European church in India), the Dutch Palace at Mattancherry, the synagogue in Jew Town, and the Chinese fishing nets along the shore. Eat at Kashi Art Café for breakfast, Dal Roti for lunch, and Fort House for an early candlelit dinner by the water. On your second evening, see a kathakali performance at the Kerala Kathakali Centre — arrive an hour early to watch the dancers apply their make-up.
Stay in a heritage homestay rather than a hotel. The lanes around Princess Street and Burgher Street are lined with restored Portuguese and Dutch merchant houses converted, very gracefully, into seven- or eight-room guesthouses. Breakfast is on a verandah. The owner usually joins you.
Nights 4 – 5 · Munnar and the high tea country
The drive up to Munnar is part of the experience — four hours of switchbacks through cardamom forest and waterfalls, climbing from sea level to nearly 6,000 feet. Hire a car and a driver from Kochi (the going rate is around $55 a day, all-inclusive) and ask to stop at the Cheeyappara and Valara waterfalls along the way.
Munnar town itself is busy and best avoided as a base. Stay above the town instead — at one of the small estate-stay properties on the Lockhart, Sevenmallay or Kannan Devan slopes — and you wake to mist drifting across rows of tea bushes that stretch to the horizon. Walk in the early morning to the Tea Museum, then drive up to Top Station for the view across into Tamil Nadu. Visit Eravikulam National Park to see the Nilgiri tahr; go early to beat the crowds.
Night 6 · Thekkady & the spice hills
From Munnar it is roughly four hours south-east to Thekkady, the gateway to Periyar Tiger Reserve. This is spice country: the cardamom, pepper, clove and cinnamon that pulled Vasco da Gama across the Indian Ocean in 1498 still grow on the surrounding hills, and a morning at a working spice plantation is one of the loveliest hours of the trip.
Skip the large boat safari on Periyar Lake — it is overcrowded and the wildlife sightings are unreliable. Book instead the early-morning bamboo rafting walk through the reserve (limited to small groups, must be reserved in advance through the Kerala Forest Department) or a guided nature walk at dawn. In the evening, watch a Kalaripayattu performance — the oldest martial art in the world, native to Kerala — at one of the small theatres in Kumily.
Night 7 · A houseboat on the backwaters
Three hours west of Thekkady, the highlands give way to the wide, flat, waterlogged country of the Kuttanad backwaters. Board your houseboat at Alleppey or — for a quieter, more bird-rich route — at Kumarakom, on the eastern edge of Vembanad Lake. The boat is yours for twenty-four hours: a captain, a chef, and a slow drift through villages and rice paddies that you can only reach by water.
Wake at six. There is mist on the water, a kingfisher on the rope, the smell of coconut oil from the kitchen below, and absolutely nothing you have to do until breakfast arrives. It is, for many travellers, the single best night of the trip.
From Alleppey it is ninety minutes back to Kochi airport — a final lunch at a sea-facing café in Fort Kochi, and the trip closes where it began.
Four small things we'd build the trip around.
A heritage homestay in Fort Kochi
Eight rooms, a Portuguese verandah, breakfast cooked by the family.
Sunrise above the Munnar tea estates
Stay above 5,000 ft and the mist comes to you.
Bamboo rafting at dawn in Periyar
Smaller, slower, and infinitely more rewarding than the lake boat.
A houseboat on Vembanad Lake
Twenty-four hours, two bedrooms, a private chef, and the quietest night of the year.