Kerala earned its nickname "God's Own Country" the honest way — by packing an entire subcontinent's worth of scenery into a state you can drive across in a day. Coconut-lined beaches on one coast, the cardamom-scented Western Ghats on the other, and in between, a maze of backwaters where life has moved at the pace of a paddle stroke for centuries. If you're planning your first trip here, the hardest part isn't finding something to do — it's narrowing down what to skip.

Start with the backwaters, because everyone will tell you to and they're right. Alleppey (Alappuzha) is the classic base for a houseboat cruise, but don't just book the first package you see. A one-night stay on a converted rice barge, drifting past paddy fields and village life at eye level, tells you more about Kerala than any museum could. Ask for a boat with a smaller crew and fewer frills — the appeal here is the silence, not the amenities.

From the water, head for the hills. Munnar sits at around 1,600 metres, and the drive up through hairpin bends lined with tea estates is reason enough to go. Time your visit for early morning if you can; the mist that settles over the plantations before 9am is the kind of thing photographs never quite capture. Wayanad, a couple of hours further north, trades the manicured tea gardens for wilder forest and is a better bet if you want a chance at spotting elephants without a formal safari.

Food deserves its own itinerary. A Kerala sadya — a full vegetarian meal served on a banana leaf during festivals — is worth timing your trip around if you can manage it, but even an ordinary breakfast of appam and stew, or puttu with kadala curry, will reorient what you think Indian food tastes like. Along the coast, expect seafood cooked in coconut and kokum rather than the cream-and-tomato gravies more familiar further north.

Practically speaking, Kerala rewards a slower pace than a typical two-week India itinerary allows. Distances between the coast, the backwaters, and the hills are short on a map but slow on winding roads, so resist the urge to cram in five bases in five nights. Three regions — one coastal, one backwater, one hill — with two or three nights each is a far more honest way to see the state than a checklist tour.

The best time to visit is between October and March, after the monsoon has cleared and before the pre-summer heat sets in. If you don't mind grey skies, though, the monsoon months (June to September) have their own appeal: this is also when Kerala's Ayurvedic treatments are traditionally considered most effective, and the backwaters are at their greenest.

Kerala isn't a place you tick off in a weekend. It's a place you come back to, usually for a reason you didn't expect the first time.