After four hours of driving across flat, dusty plains and up hair-raising mountain roads, south India’s tea country looks like something from another world. It almost does the landscape an injustice to say that it is green, given the many shades of lush, verdant terrain.

Thousands of lines of carefully sculpted tea bushes roll across the hillsides in front of us, like a giant, unfolding, emerald mosaic. Low cottages dot the valley, and from time to time I catch sight of distant groups of gaily coloured tea pickers, high on the slopes above. Gazing out, and stuck for comparisons, I am reduced to Hollywood: the island from Jurassic Park; the forest in Avatar.

My partner and I are on our way to stay in two converted bungalows, first in Tamil Nadu then in the neighbouring state of Kerala. Built in the first half of the past century, bungalows such as these were once the jewels of Britain’s imperial tea plantations, where colonial estate managers and their families lived a life that was at once luxurious and isolated.