Udupi & Murudeshwar

Udupi is a temple town that exported a cuisine. The Krishna Matha, founded by the philosopher Madhvacharya in the thirteenth century, holds a Krishna idol facing west, worshipped through a silver-latticed window called the Kanakana Kindi, opened, the story goes, so the singer Kanakadasa could see the god who turned to face him. Eight mathas take turns running the temple, and the handover, the Paryaya, happens every two years in January with a dawn procession down Car Street.

The kitchen's discipline and its cooks travelled to Bombay and Madras and became the Udupi hotel; the masala dosa and the steel-tumbler filter coffee are both claimed for this coast. Six kilometres away at Malpe, boats leave for St Mary's Islands, where columnar basalt formed by lava about eighty-eight million years ago stands in hexagonal pillars straight out of the sand. A hundred kilometres north at Murudeshwar, a thirty-seven-metre Shiva sits on Kanduka hill with the Arabian Sea on three sides, and a twenty-storey gopura carries a lift to a gallery above the temple.

Netrani Island, nineteen kilometres offshore, offers the best scuba diving on the west coast between October and May. In between are fishing harbours, the Jain basadis of Karkala and Moodabidri, and a coast that runs on neer dosa and fish curry.