'Sweaty', 'baggy', 'scorched', 'baked', even a bit 'skunky'. The adjectives spiral off a chart hanging in the coffee curing works, the worst insults a taster can level at a row of beans.

And pretty apt for me too, I reckon, five minibus-hours out of Bangalore, on the mad March roads of Karnataka. Here in coffee country, near Chikmagalur, Shaji Philip's garbling sheds and cool laboratory seem monuments to order and sobriety. The sobering bit involves the realities of garbling. Coffee acquires a whole new flavour when you realise that every mouthful requires an army of women to sit cross-legged on a warehouse floor and sort a zillion beans by hand for 67p a day.

Scattered across the Deccan plains, Karnataka's tourist highlights involve seemingly interminable drives. As yet another lorry painted with gods and lotus flowers bears down on us, both vehicles klaxoning frantically in a ritual attempt to bluster the other into last-ditch capitulation, I realise that resignation rather than rage rules the road. If several tonnes of Birla cement are as determined as you are not to recognise the opposition's God-given right of way, then hey, that's karma.

We trundle over seas of rice husks, spread under passing traffic wheels for a last threshing. As I watch the schoolboys playing cricket under the dusty mangoes; the tailor under his umbrella; a bicycle wobbling under its load of 50 water pots; the crowd milling about a travelling circus tent, I am reminded of Kim , Rudyard Kipling's love let ter to the roads of India: 'Such a river of life as nowhere else exists in the world'.

A loaded elephant, his tusks handsomely bound with brass, sways along the verge behind five old men in saffron robes, their ash-striped foreheads proclaiming them to be devotees of Shiva. Already three months' march from their monastery near Bombay, the swamis are touring the holy places of South India, sleeping in pilgrim hostels, relying on the endless hospitality of the villages. And the bundled elephant? 'That is the luggage of the saints,' explains their leader with dignity.

Would the saints make it to Halebid and Belur? The superb Hoysala temples near Hassan on the edge of the Western Ghats are presented more as monuments than liv ing temples. But, in this part of the world, you can't keep a good shrine down; the air at Belur comes thickened with incense and the scent of clarified butter on hot stone.

Even without the holiday crowds - the scrubbed schoolchildren, the woman with the shaved head and gold jewellery who has come to ask a blessing from the goddess Parvati - these temples hum with life. Their deities parade on friezes more than eight centuries old: the gods are as vigorous as ever, moving mountains, slaying demons, and dancing creation into being; the celestial girls eternally glance into mirrors and shake scorpions from their saris.

The mirage at the end of the road is the Taj Garden Retreat, a country haven near Chikmagalur run in relaxed, professional style. Say you like the food (we do) and the chef whips up a demonstration. Say you are tired (I am) and an Ayurvedic masseuse appears at your door.

Rajeswari pushes up her bangles to oil away my jetlag with what feels like at least four pairs of hands. Sleepily, I identify the scents of lemon grass, eucalyptus and sandalwood. Raji is aged 28 and despite her steady job and good grasp of English, she is, she tells me matter-of-factly, unlikely to marry. Her father is a drunk and out of work; the dowry needed before a Nair girl's family can look for a good husband is an impossible dream.

Much of my time at Chikmagalur is spent trying to avoid the reproachful gaze of Sayed Abdul Babu, the hotel's resident magician whose show I have unaccountably missed. He produces certificates to prove his skills. How could I have ignored his star turn, the extraction from his mouth of 150 rusty nails?

I have instead been playing darts at midnight in the snug of an English pub. Shaji Philip, the coffee king, has invited me and a couple more for a whisky at the planters' hang-out. The Kadur Club has stood its ground in Chikmagalur for more than a century, originally as a home-from-home for expatriate plantation managers. Despite the fact that it was 1969 before the club had its first Indian president, today's local membership loyally continues to favour clear soup, roast chicken and bread and butter pudding and to stock the glass-fronted cabinets of the store room with tinned salmon and Angostura Bitters.

Worm-eaten sporting prints and photographs of long-dead revellers in fancy dress hang among the stuffed bison and tiger skins. Shaji says that there is still, according to time-honoured custom, a wooden coffin kept for any member meeting an untimely end.

He wakes the manager to demand the club's original Complaints Book, a surreally British compilation of gripes. 'Is there no chance of getting a decent cup of tea in the early mornings?' fulminates an entry of 1896. There are weevils in the horse straw, holes in the mosquito netting, a dead cockroach in the Monaco biscuit tin. The servants steal the dog food and mix limewash in the bath tubs. Peppery asides on 'putrid champagne' and a lack of quill pens run drunkenly off the margins.

Bangalore, more cyber than quill pen, may be only five hours up the road but is separated by light years from this vanished world. Its bookshops major on feminism, feng shui and net attitude. The newspapers that appear under my hotel bedroom door discuss an electronically-enhanced event held to bring prospective marriage partners together and a Women Only Night at a pub called Urban Edge.

We dutifully visit the old Bull Temple - deserted except for the priest and a student mugging up on intellectual property law - and inspect trees planted in the venerable Botanic Gardens by such diverse figures as the Queen, Tipu Sultan and Nikita Kruschev. The real city tour is the one taking in five universities; the world-famous Indian Institute of Management Bangalore; the premises of some 900 software companies; and research centres dedicated to aerospace and biotechnology.

Bangalore may not feature on the itinerary of our travelling saints; but, as part of the river of life, it feels right on course.

Factfile

Juliet Clough travelled courtesy of the Government of India Tourist Office (020 7437 3677) and Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces (0800 282699).

Greaves Travel (020 7487 9111) offers seven nights at the Taj Garden Retreat, Chikmagalur, from £1,179 per person, based on two people sharing a twin/double-bedded room. This price includes seven nights' B&B at the Taj Garden Retreat, one night at the Ramada Plaza hotel in Bombay, flights, transfers, sightseeing and porterage at airports. This offer is valid until 15 April 2003.

A superior double room at Taj West End Bangalore, costs $269.50 (£167) per night, based on two people sharing, on a room-only basis.

Air India (020 8560 9996) flies Heathrow to Bangalore via Bombay three times weekly. Heathrow to Mumbai fares start at about £300.