Keralite lets nature takes its course at eco-resort

An Indian entrepreneur and counsellor for HCT men's college in Madinat Zayed has transformed his family farm back in Kerala into an eco-tourism destination.

Isaac Cherian at his Ela Blooms eco-resort in Kerala. Courtesy Isaac Cherian

Isaac Cherian wanted to fish in the pond on his farm, back in his homeland of Kerala, India, but there was one snag. He searched the whole 18 acres of his cardamom farm, but he couldn't find any worms to use as bait. For Mr Cherian, that meant the pesticides he'd used on his cardamom plants had contaminated the soil, killing off the other life that depended on it. This was a defining moment for the 39-year-old UAE resident, who later decided to use his farm for very different purposes - transforming it into an eco-resort called Ela Blooms.
When not at his Keralan farm, Mr Cherian lives with his wife, a university lecturer and his two children, age three and seven in Al Ain. It's at least a three-hour commute through the desert to where he works as a counsellor at HCT Men's Colleges at Madinat Zayed and Ruwais in the Western Region, through landscape very different to his farm set in the rolling green hills of Wayanad in Kerala.
He recalls school holidays spent at what was then his grandfather's farm, during cardamom picking season. His ancestors had lived on the mountain for countless generations.
"As a child it was so exciting to come to the farm. We'd see elephants, monkeys, and at that time there were tigers," although Mr Cherian points out there have been no tiger sightings for the past 10 years.
In 2006 when his grandfather died, Mr Cherian was living in Dubai and working as a councillor in Sharjah. The cardamom farm was due to be split between family members. "I had happy memories so I bought the other family members' chunks of land. I hired a manager to look after the farm, visiting whenever I could. I love farming, but I felt uncomfortable that we were using this systemically poisonous pesticide. I knew if we stopped, we would make a loss for sure."
The final straw came that day when Mr Cherian struggled to find a single earthworm at the farm.
"I thought 'enough is enough - no more pesticide use'. We'll go with the 'Do Nothing Farming' technique instead [popularised by the Japanese philosopher Masanobu Fukuoka 1913-2008] where you let it grow wild and just pick what's there."
In 2010, the farmer stopped using pesticides and at first the farm ran at a loss.
Then he noticed travellers often visited a cave on his land to go camping.
"They said it was an amazing place, unlike anywhere they'd been before," recalls Mr Cherian. "It one of the eight 'hottest hot spots' of biological diversity in the world, up on a mountain with amazing views, always warm but not hot, and the forest is beautiful - so I thought, the only way out is to turn the farm into a place for people to stay. "
Mr Cherian transformed the nearby cave into a habitable cave house, built a two-room cottage at the farm and converted an old tribal mud hut into accommodation. By 2011 he had started building a road going up the mountain, but one that could be accessed only by jeep.
"If I wanted to bring a lorry of bricks up, it cost me three times more compared to if I had built something in the city, because for almost 4 kilometres whatever was needed had to be taken by jeep. It's been much more expensive than I'd bargained for," says Mr Cherian, who has invested Dh769,000 of his savings into the project
"All the money I've been earning here in the UAE has paid for the farm, and I had to sell my jeep to help. People asked me: 'Why are you investing so much in this farm?' The tribal people living on the opposite mountain think I'm crazy. It's a risk but I love this farm, it's a part of me."
Mr Cherian launched www.elablooms.com in February this year. He uses www.booking.com and Facebook to attract business, with most guests to his eco-friendly mountain retreat young middle class IT professionals from Bangalore, a city near enough to attract weekenders wanting to enjoy India's natural scenery. He's also starting to tap into the UAE market, as Kerala is only four hours away from Abu Dhabi by plane.
However, Mr Cherian still doesn't see his venture as a way to make money but as a means of sustaining the farm organically. "I don't want to make it a big ranch because then the beauty and solitude of the place will be gone.
"I like to keep the farm, so when I eventually give up my UAE job I've got a place to escape to," he says, adding that on his last trip home he was able to go fishing with live bait once again. "There's no guilt any more, I am free from that now."
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