Spice Village

Description

Imagine a resort where less is really more. No air-conditioning or television or nightclubs. Just a mirror, held up to an age old culture and a living harmony. This is the tribal village, reborn for the modern traveller.

Curling around a misty ridge 2,000 ft high in the Periyar fastness, we found an arborarium, one man's personal forest, with fruit trees, rare herbs and a profusion of flowering plants.
And here, we set out to build a resort. A village, produced whole, using mountain spirit and tribal wisdom as building material.
Your cottage is brick and log, the roof thatched with the same elephant grass used in tribal huts, woven in the same traditional techniques.
Of course, the comforts of a modern hotel exist, but they never intrude. Modern plumbing, comfortable beds and hot showers find their place, but in a setting stripped down to its natural essence.
Hewn stone replaces shag carpets. Birdsong takes the place of television.
Air-conditioning? Unnecessary anyway in the fine mountain climate, and what would it do but mask the heady scents of spice forests?

At Spice Village, its easy to think that you're in the middle of wild nature. Not so. These trees were born out of one man's passion.
His name was A. W. Woods. An Anglo-Indian, he worked for the Government of the British Raj in the 1930s. Woods was a remarkable man, nearly illiterate, given charge of the forests solely on the basis of his passion for nature and his love and understanding of the local Ooralie culture.
Woods also had the greenest of thumbs. And on the grounds surrounding his home (now the Woodhouse Bar), he created a remarkable arborarium.

You can still take a deck chair out to his verandah, sip (what else?) a gin-and-tonic and say hello to its denizens.A kingfisher dives low out of a clear blue sky, hunting vainly for its fish lunch. Bees hum around teak trees, and Colombian coffee bushes. Guinea fowls and ducks chatter about (amazingly tame, because they're used to guests.) Bamboos burst in tilting spires. Cascades of trumpet flowers, pepper vines and honeysuckle wash down the hillsides. And everywhere, the structures of Spice Village peep out of the woods, as if growing naturally from the surroundings.

As with all the cgh properties, Spice offers a holiday for the inner you as well. With healing and rejuvenation therapies combining ayurvedic massage and yoga.
We've got qualified ayurvedic doctors who'll guide you through a regimen of massages and herbal baths guaranteed to give you new verve and vigour.

Location

CGH Earth
Casino Building, Willingdon Island,
Cochin, Kerala, India - 682 003

Available Room Types

More Details

• Industry: 4Star
• Mobile: 91-484-3011711
• Email: info@cghearth.com
• Website: http://www.cghearth.com/spice_village/spice_villag