The hills where India learned to drink coffee.
The story goes that in the 17th century, a Sufi saint named Baba Budan smuggled seven coffee beans out of Yemen sewn into his beard, and planted them in the hills above what is now Chikmagalur. Whether the legend is literally true or not, these hills are undeniably where Indian coffee began — and where some of the best of it is still grown today.
Chikmagalur sits at the northern end of the Western Ghats in Karnataka, a landscape of extraordinary biological richness. The lower slopes are dense with coffee and cardamom estates, their canopy shade-trees draped in mist through most of the morning. Higher up, the estates give way to shola forest — the dense, stunted montane forest unique to the Western Ghats — and above that, the rolling grassland ridges and rocky summits of Mullayanagiri and Baba Budangiri.
These 68 photographs were taken across Chikmagalur district — on estate roads, at waterfalls, on summit approaches, and in the quiet early hours when the fog sits in every valley and the hills remind you how old they are.
