Not lounging in but mucking out

A new generation of rural retreats offers rustic accommodation, home-grown produce and the chance to get your hands dirty.
When Vrichita and San deep Karnik travelled to Mumbai from Muscat for their annual holiday in July, they visited family, met up with friends and shopped.But they also spent three days planting rice in a remote corner of coastal Maharashtra.
The Karniks are city people. Sandeep works in a shipping company, Vrichita is a housewife and their teenage daughter Nishita is a student. But they were enchanted by their farm stay in Ratnagiri. "Homely atmosphere and great food. It was really fun, "Vrichita says, about their rainy, slushy but fabulous vacation.
India, we've often been told, lives in its villages. But we've rarely bothered to experience this for ourselves. The Karniks are, however, part of a new breed of tourists eager to get away from the hill station-and-history trail and visit unexpected corners of rural India. They are willing to put up with insects, no mobile signal and mystifying T-junctions in order to watch cows being milked, collect their own eggs from the hencoop and munch on the sweet potatoes that they've pulled from the ground. As long as there are clean rooms and good loos at the end of the day.
Which is why remote getaways like the Farm of Happiness -an old-style Konkan house near Phungus village, which can only be accessed by a twisty drive on lonely rural roads -are springing up across the country . Tea estates near Darjeeling and coffee plantations in Coorg have been offering accommodation for some years, but now small-time farmers in Maharashtra, orchards in Uttarakhand and farsighted entrepreneurs in Rajasthan are also jumping onto the"get your hands muddy" bandwagon.
For example, at Amrute's Nisarga Sahavas, another farm stay near Ratnagiri, visitors can graft plants, thresh rice and harvest fruits. While at Maachli in lush Sindhudurg, they can cook on an open flame and use traditional kitchen implements. At Our Native Village near Bangalore, they can milk cows and acquire a Bullock Cart Driving licence. At Acres Wild in Coonoor, guests can enroll in the cheese-making course. At the Banyan Tree Farmstay in Tamil Nadu, they can fish for their own dinner. While at the upmarket Lakshman Sagar in Rajasthan, they can master the tricky art of herding goats and harvesting vegetables for their own dinner.
Clearly, agro-tourism is where the action is. "Farm stays like ours are for people who want a safe, clean place that's close to nature, "says Rahul Kulkarni, a Mumbai-based ad man who felt he was getting "fried"and yearned for a simple, sustainable lifestyle. In 2005, he realized he had inherited a plot of land and gradually, patch by patch, experiment by experiment, established the organic Farm of Happiness. "I built the kind of house that my grandfather would have, with laterite bricks, niches, porches and a clay floor covered with cowdung. We now let out three rooms and it's been wonderful. The villagers feel so proud that people are actually coming all this way to our small, isolated village."
But why are guests bothering to make these bone-rattling journeys?
"People are fed up of typical resorts with everything artificial. Here they are getting good, neat and clean rooms and hygienic homemade food from the farm. And they are also learning something different, "says Ashish Amrute of Amrute's Nisarga Sahavas.
Concurs Pravin Samant, who runs Maachli Farmstay on his ancestral plantation in Sindhudurg: "Visitors who come here in the monsoon love to sow plants alongside the farmers. In summer they pluck their own mangoes and berries and eat them under a tree. Guests come to enjoy and understand village life."
The Samants, who have been farmers for generations before straying into the world of hospitality, offer four beautifully designed cottages hidden amidst the cashew and kokam trees. "We treat guests the way we treat our own relatives. When a son-in-law visits for the first time, it can be difficult, but it also brings us joy. It is the same with guests who come to our farmstay. "
The Salvis, who run Majhya MamachaGaon near Ratnagiri, also maintain that their visitors come as tourists and leave as "relatives". Like fussy sons-in-law, then, guests are pampered with the freshest vegetables, the plumpest prawns and the most labour-intensive delicacies. And this is the norm in most farm stays.
"Everything we serve is locally sourced or made in-house. So instead of ice cream we may make kulfi," says Inderpal Singh Kochhar, an innovative hotelier who set up Lakshman Sagar in Rajasthan."For snacks we whip up some chikki or tilpatti. Instead of cold drinks we offer khus varieties and fresh juices."
It is these traditional flavours and touches that are attracting numerous tourists. "When you stay at such places, you experience the place, the people and the culture in a very different way, " says Shilpa Sheth, an ardent traveller who is happy to weed, play in bales of hay and dabble with rangoli on cowdung floors. "For me this is real travel."