• Multi-storey construction from local materials, including panoramic balcony, flush toilet, (cold) shower, kerosene lamps, and one or two double bedrooms.

• One treehouse has a water-operated lift – turn on the tap for ten minutes to fill a large counterweight-bag for a controlled descent – while a second is connected to the cliffside by a hanging bridge.

• Room service: call like a cuckoo and tea will be hoisted to your treehouse on a tray.
• Cleansing plant extracts provided: red sandalwood and turmeric for the face, waka bark for the body, rice charcoal for the teeth.
• A marvellous restaurant serving wholesome vegetarian food.

• A totally ecological approach: solar panels, gobar-powered cookers, pesticide-free vegetable garden, lake-water from a pipe, chemical-free leach pits, no plastic anywhere, and no energy-thirsty appliances in the lodge, which aims to become self-sufficient in power.
• There is a social benefit too: local Paniya tribesmen, whose traditional erumadam tree-platforms inspired the project, but who were displaced from this forest when it achieved national heritage status, now help build and maintain the treehouses.

• You could spend a long time just sitting in your rattan chaise longue on the balcony, drinking in one of the most privileged views in the rainforest, especially at sunset.
• Look up from your book and you may spot a Malabar squirrel, whistling thrush, or even a Nilgiri langour monkey.
• Play Tarzan in an adult adventure playground.
• Take signed trails through the forest, or guided walks further to viewpoints, lakes or some cave paintings.

• Contemplate life as nature intended it – after all, Buddha achieved enlightenment sitting beneath a banyan tree. Hop into the wicker lift and winch yourself down to the open-plan restaurant-cottage for a supper you’ll never forget. Vegetables are grown in an organic garden on the hill, cooked with local spices and served with rice, lentils or roti-bread using a plantain leaf for a plate. Arranged like dollops of earthy paint on an artist’s palette, you quickly learn to mix your own colours, add a drop of sticky sauce and scoop the delicious wodge into your mouth with your fingers. Green banana with roasted coconut paste, a ratatouille of onions-tomatoes-ladies fingers in curry and mustard seeds … this is Keralan cuisine pure and simple.

• The dishes are cooked over a gobar-powered fire ( from the lodge’s 6 bullocks, naturally) in an open-access kitchen which would pass any hygiene test. An equally heartening breakfast of local tea or coffee, fresh fruit, omelette, ghee, toast and baked banana is hoisted to your room every morning. 
• Please note that there are no conventional soft drinks or alcohol on site.

Wanderlust April / May 2001: Little that any modern hotel provides can match the experience of waking up in a bedroom that has been constructed in the rainforest canopy 26m above the ground, with a wrap-around balcony…, a bathroom open to the squirrels, and an unparalleled view across the misty and mystical Wayanad Hills’ 

The Times (Susannah Jowitt) 24/02/2001: ‘There is indeed green magic at every turn’ 

Tatler Travel Guide 2000: ‘The organically grown food is simple Keralan, which is some of the best in India…’ 

The Observer (Lesley Gillian) 09/08/1998: ‘…like waking up in an orchestra pit as a choir of songbirds welcomed the dawn…’ 

Lonely Planet ‘Kerala’ (2000): ‘A genuine forest experience with minimal negative impact’

British Guild of Travel Writers, 2000: Runner-up in the Silver Otter Award (for sustainable tourism projects).

Reviews from Clients

Articles from Magasines

It's host is a 200-year-old banyan tree, and it must have one of the more unusual hotel lifts in the world; instead of pressing a call-button you turn a wooden tap - and then wait for ten minutes while a black bag fills with water. 

Even getting to this treehouse - for that is what it is - can be a fairly robust experience. The nearest transport hub is Calicut, with rail and domestic flight connections, from where the tortuous Ooty road climbs 65km up frowning hills through cardamom, rubber, ginger, betel-nut, coffee and tea plantations, and every hairpin seems to have a bus stuck in its throat. The last 30 minutes is off-road in a four-wheel drive, where leopards and elephant are sometimes caught in the headlights. After all that, being hauled up 87ft through darkness in an ethnic lazy Susan, passing a water-filled counterweight half way up, doesn't seem such an unusual thing to do.

There is something of a local tradition at work here. Tribes in the Wynad used to regularly build treehouses to escape from predators and watch over their agricultural land. The Green Magic treehouses were built using their expertise.

The timbers are jungle jackfruit, the lashings are coir rope, the walls are bamboo matting and roofs are local thatch. Each bedroom has its own ensuite bathroom and shower, with herbal powders provided instead of soaps: Vaka (made from roots) for the body, Shikaki (made from leaves) for hair, and red sandalwood and jungle turmeric, mixed, for the face. It feels like washing yourself with earth, but it works.

You wouldn't be human if you didn't feel some sensation of alarm initially, especially when the tree shifts slightly in the night breeze and bursting seed pods sound like gunfire. It's like being on the bridge of a ship of the forest, with a slight list to starboard and with nothing but the stars way up above and the gentle glow of paraffin lamps way down below.

The bedroom can be curtained all round, but why seal yourself off from a 360 degree sunrise? You need to be able to smell the forest floor warming up while still in bed, to listen to the Malabar Whistling Bird close at hand and the black monkeys further away. You only need to stir to retrieve the coffee tray, which has come up in the lift by itself.

Breakfast is fruit, omelette, ghee, toast and baked banana - although you have to shout, "cuckoo" from the treetops to get down to eat it. The kitchen uses gober gas made on site from cow dung, and serves its authentic Keralan vegetarian food in the authentic way - on banana leaves and with no knife or fork. Many ingredients are drawn from the organic garden in a clearing up the hill; onion, tomato, snake gourd, ladies fingers, tapioca, ginger and cucumber, cooked with turmeric, coconut, cardamom, coriander and chili.

There's such an overwhelming sense of place that what you actually do while staying at Green Magic is a rather secondary consideration - although if you're not in your treehouse at sunset you will miss one of nature's finest shows. Up on the balcony, time just slips past. I found it a very suitable place to read A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth's 1,400-page meander through Indian society, looking up occasionally to check on the position of the sun, the thickness of the mist, and to make sure the Malabar squirrels weren't eating my socks.

In this dense forest, the resort doesn't like guests wandering off without an escort; miss the path and you could be gone forever. Shibu took me for an hour's walk uphill to a cloud-crowned rock with a breath-stopping two-valley view. We stopped en route to pick a freshwater crab out of the stream and to admire dragonflies and butterflies, including the Common Bluebottle and the appropriately named Hill Jezebel.

I wasn't quite so pleased to see the other wildlife, but it seemed very pleased to see me. Shibu had provided me with anti-leech galoshes and a stick with a bag of salt, and by God they were necessary. You could see the little blighters all over the path wherever it dipped out of the sun and it was hard not to go into a frenzied dance as they started to climb up my boots.

"Don't stop", Shibu kept warning me; "if you stop, you get more."

By the time we finally got to the rock, there were 22 leeches resident in my boots, but none had penetrated the galoshes.

Leeches aside, the visitors to the treehouses were a mix of the familiar and the exotic. Two English couples were in residence when I arrived, and when I left the other guests were two Indian film stars of great jollity and enormous girth. If the infrastructure could cope with them, then it could cope with anybody.

Overall, this is a place for the sophisticated in search of the simple; it's a place where the best creativity of nature meets the ingenuity of man, and, as it says in the Green Magic visitors' book, God lives on the 7th floor.

Arriving at the main camp, there are 8 land-based cottages, a dining and lounging area, plus a tree house, 90 feet up in the branches of a giant Ficus tree. This is where Craig was booked in to stay. You get up there by a combination of pulleys and counterweights, and you are winched up to the top in a basket. The tree house is open and basic, with fantastic views all around. 

Anyone wanting to get back to nature, but at a certain price: adventurous families, honeymooning couples, naturalists, the occasional famous writer or Bollywood filmstar. 

Adventurous older children will adore this place – it’s like a Tarzan film come true! Basket lifts, hanging bridges and the novel cuisine contribute to the fun. Any child under 7 goes free with a paying adult. But remember: safety is not up to Western standards. There are waist-high banisters, but also some gaps and things to trip over; no fire extinguishers, and lift safety has yet to be approved. 

This is one place that really shines in the rainy season (May – September): the forest is at its most verdant, the wildlife at its most melodious – but there are lots of leeches. It is drier and slightly cooler from October to March. 

A full day to settle in and do some serious relaxing, plus a second day to explore the paths and wildlife are essential. Anything less and you will have spent more time getting there than being there. Longer than 5 nights and you’ll be really getting back to nature, or enjoying some deep meditation. 

You’ve always been meaning to read, binoculars, torch, raincoat and stout shoes against the leeches in rainy season (though galoshes are provided) and your best head for heights. No plastics are allowed.

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