IN KARNATAKA, the state of jungles, forests and tigers that forms the hinterland to the booming city of Bangalore, the green tourist movement has become mainstream. Most British visitors will be searching for something more off the beaten track than neighbouring Goa and Kerala, and with good reason.

Consider the eco-friendly credentials of the resort of Devbagh, where you can stay in a well-appointed giant tent (with bathroom) or a log cabin, watch the sunset from the beach and have dinner by a campfire on the sand. In the morning, before your dolphin-watching boat trip, you can watch fishermen hauling in their catch from the surf.

Karnataka’s national parks share with Kerala the fabulous draw of tigers, but tourists are more likely to see sambar deer, Malabar giant squirrels, langur monkeys and whitebacked vultures. And if you come through Bangalore, try to obtain a leaflet put out by the Karnataka Forest Department, called Field Guide to 100 Birds of Bangalore City, so that you can start wildlife watching right away.

Once British tourists stayed in traditional lodges such as Kabini River Lodge, in Nagarhole National Park, where the future Edward VII was a guest of the Maharajah of Mysore and Mountbatten met his future wife, and where photographs of tiger hunts from the Twenties still hang on the walls. The lodge is presided over by Colonel John Wakefield, an Indian-born Englishman, who knows the jungles and their animals intimately.

Today, however, the lodge is run according to strict ecological principles, just like the new eco-resorts such as Cicada, farther along Lake Kabini and about 220km from Bangalore. Here Harsha, the resident naturalist, told me: “In Texas alone, there are more tigers in captivity than wild in the whole of India”, which made me feel better about not having spotted one.

As a result of fluctuating world prices, the coffee plantations are also diversifying into eco-tourism. A stay in Orange County, near Coorg, is both luxurious – the tents, cottages, ayurvedic food and treatments and dark, natural-looking swimming pools are all of good quality – and educational. It is fun to take an early morning walk through the organic coffee and spice plantations with Ganesh, one of the resort’s naturalists, and absorb some of his enthusiasm and stories. Would you cycle more than 10km to work in the dark at 5am, knowing that you might well bump into a menacing elephant on a noctural ramble?

Elephants are everywhere. We got up close and personal on an afternoon visit to Dubare elephant camp near Coorg. After wading across the rushing Cauvery River we saw the semi-wild elephants coming out of the forest for their afternoon tea. At Dubare you can help to feed the baby elephants and give them their early evening bath in the river. www.junglelodges.com; www.orangecounty.in; www.cicadaresorts.com