Two words suffix the Fringe Ford logo – ‘Get Lost’.
And lost you are, at this 1912 British styled cottage in the middle of a 520 acre coffee estate, in a faraway land of drooping vines draped over trees, the thick undergrowth of coffee and cardamom plantations and a million shades of green. A veritable bastion of the lush Western Ghats, the property stretches to merge with the Brahmagiri range, Tirunelli and parts of Tholpetty forests. Fringe Ford is a pleasant respite from the Kerala cliches of Ayurveda and backwaters. Instead you are submerged in a copious dose of wildlife and nature; the elephants, Indian bison (gaur), wild dogs, sambars, barking deer and a host of other jungle residents are regular visitors to the fromt yard. The high branches of a mango tree in the courtayrd is testimony to many an elephant back rubs. Stories from the wild will keep you engaged for hours – my favourite being, about the Muthu, the cook, who uses a lighter to walk back to his village everynight and bumped into the trunk of an elephant on the path. Here, there are traffic jams of a different kind.
