My grandfather farmed this land. He planted the first cardamom here, on terraces he cut into the hill himself, and he farmed it the way people farmed then — through good seasons that paid for the next bad one, and bad ones that tested whether the family would keep at it. My father inherited that same rhythm and, for a while, the same trade: cardamom mostly, with pepper and a little coffee at the edges, sold the way it had always been sold, through the same routes and the same buyers his father had used.
By 2009 the arithmetic had stopped working the way it once did. Prices had gone thin, the seasons had gotten harder to predict, and the family that had once worked this land together had, like most families, scattered a little — some to the city, some abroad, none of them farming full-time anymore. My father stopped working the plantation the way it had been worked for two generations, and for a while nobody quite knew what the land was for.
What we didn't want to do was sell it, or let it sit empty and slowly go back to forest on its own terms. So we did something closer to the opposite: we opened it up. One cottage first, built more or less where a barn used to stand, then a second, then two more, each one going up between the trees that were already there rather than clearing space for something grander. We are not innkeepers by training or temperament. We are a family who happened to have some land we loved and a few extra rooms, and who decided that sharing both was better than watching either sit idle. I still don't think of myself as running a hotel. Mostly, I just make sure the beds are ready before anyone arrives to sleep in them.