Best of Southern India

Best of Southern India

Southern India is the India that rewards the traveller who chooses depth over distance — who is willing to slow down, look closely, and allow a two-week journey through Kerala, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu to unfold at the pace that this magnificent region has always set for itself. The India Escapes Best of Southern India tour is designed precisely for that kind of travel: a 14-day small-group adventure that covers nine extraordinary destinations across three culturally distinct Indian states, moving by train, private vehicle, cycle-rickshaw, country boat, and auto-rickshaw in a multi-modal journey that keeps you genuinely close to the landscapes and communities you are passing through. With a maximum group size of just 12 travellers and a dedicated CEO (Chief Experience Officer) from the first day to the last, this is southern India experienced with real depth, real flexibility, and real access. The tour opens in Kochi — Kerala's ancient spice-trading port city of extraordinary multicultural heritage — with an evening orientation walk along the iconic waterfront and a Kathakali dance performance that introduces Kerala's most celebrated classical art form in the most atmospheric possible setting. From there, a morning train carries the group to Wayanad, Kerala's highland district of tea estates, spice plantations, and remarkable prehistoric rock art, before the road continues to Mysore — the regal, perfume-scented city of the former Wodeyar Maharajas, with its extraordinary palace, its Chamundi Hill temple, and its legendary Devaraja Market overflowing with jasmine garlands, silk, and spices. A full day of train travel then brings the group to Mamallapuram on the Tamil Nadu coast, where the 7th-century Shore Temple's UNESCO World Heritage complex provides a breathtaking first encounter with the Dravidian temple architecture that will define the Tamil Nadu chapter of the journey. Pondicherry — the former French colonial enclave — provides a delightfully unexpected urban interlude with its wide boulevards, French-named streets, and the spiritual depth of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, before inland Madurai delivers the tour's most dramatically immersive Tamil cultural experience: a cycle-rickshaw tour through the ancient bazaar, the Gandhi Memorial Museum, and the overwhelming Sri Meenakshi Temple complex — one of the finest examples of Dravidian temple architecture anywhere in India, with its towers of painted sculpture rising above the city like a sacred mountain range. Thekkady's Cardamom Hills spice plantation tour introduces the agricultural world that gave Kerala its place at the centre of the ancient global spice trade, while the Periyar Lake boat ride adds wildlife encounters of genuine natural beauty. The tour's most personal and most intimate experience then arrives in Alleppey: the Kerala Backwaters local homestay, where travellers spend a night with a local family on a backwater island, exploring the waterways at sunset in a small country boat and experiencing the quietly extraordinary daily life of a community that has lived in relationship with this unique water world for generations. The final day's stop at the Theruvarom Women's Empowerment Project — a G for Good Moment that directly supports the Planeterra Foundation's work with local women's cooperative groups — brings responsible travel principles to life in the most direct and most personally meaningful way. Kochi's final day provides a graceful, generous close to fourteen days of extraordinary southern Indian discovery.