Old Mattancherry packs a dozen migrant merchant communities into a few streets, each with its own temple or mosque and its own cuisine: Kutchi Memon, Gujarati, Konkani, Tamil Brahmin. You eat through the back lanes with someone who belongs to them, and a Syrian Christian family cooks appam and duck the way they would for their own feast day.

In the hills the food comes straight off the land. You walk a shade-grown smallholding where coffee, pepper and cardamom share one acre with the family that farms it, and cook over a wood fire in a farmhouse: the scented Gandhakasala rice, wild greens, nothing elaborate. Honey comes from the Kattunaikka, the forest's master honey-hunters, through their own co-operative.

Down onto the Bharathapuzha, the river known as the Nila, the cultural heartland of Kerala and the true home of its classical arts. At Kerala Kalamandalam you spend a morning inside the gurukula as Kathakali, Kutiyattam and the great drums are actually taught, in the koothambalam, not staged for an audience. This is the real thing the Fort Kochi tourist shows only imitate.

Not the diesel houseboat highway but the water behind it. You pole the narrow Kuttanad canals at dawn by country canoe, past paddy farmed below sea level, coir yards and toddy palms, and pull karimeen from the net. Lunch is a genuine kallu shappu, the backwater toddy shop that is Kerala's original gastropub: kappa and fierce fish curry, a Kuttanad duck roast, fresh palm toddy.

A slow finish on a Latin Catholic fishing coast, where the boats still land on the sand and the parish church sets the rhythm of the week. You choose the morning catch off the beach, and a fishing family cooks it simply in coconut and chilli with kappa, as the light goes.