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It was time to leave Ooty and return to Coimbatore. Although it wouldn’t take as long as it did coming up in the train, it would still take a couple of hours to get back to the city. The road followed the swooping, sweeping curves of the mountainsides, giving us stunning views out over the plain on which Coimbatore is sited, and more intimate views of the tea plantations which occupied every conceivable surface, and a few surfaces which one wouldn’t find conceivable. Every once in a while, little spots of bright colour could be seen moving in the fields of rich green, where workers were harvesting the tea leaves. I felt humbled and grateful – some people in this world have to pick tea leaves for a living, probably as their parents and grandparents did before them, while I sweep by in the back of a shiny SUV while on holiday from a place 6,500kms away, taking photos with my iPhone.

Back in Coimbatore, while we were unpacking the car, Mr Fixit casually mentioned that all of The Boss’s cars have the same number plate. When I observed that this seemed unlikely, even for a man of virtually unlimited resources, he clarified that all of the cars have the same last four digits on their number plates, while the first three or four are different. Apparently, whenever a new batch of license numbers are released, The Boss buys up all of them ending in these four digits, then has them assigned to his cars as needed.

And he needs a lot. Beyond the sextet of Mercedes, there’s the trio of top-of-the-range Skoda Kodiaq SUVs, identical except in colour (white, black and grey), that are used as our daily transport. Then there’s a pair of Skoda Octavias - one grey, one black - that are for the daughter and her family to use when they’re in town, and as such they haven’t moved since we got here, although they’ve been washed by the staff. Additionally, there’s a 90s vintage Toyota Supra and a Lexus that belong to the son, although he uses one of the Mercedes E-class sedans for his day to day business. Then there’s a couple of anonymous white Toyota Camrys for less favoured staff and guests, and a Suzuki delivery van.

This brings the vehicle count up to 14, although I could easily have missed a couple. Naturally, this doesn’t include the scooters, tractors, golf carts and other boring necessity vehicles.

When it came time for pre-dinner drinks, I decided to move forward with a plan I’d been fomenting to make some cocktails. Cocktails in this part of India don’t seem to run to anything more sophisticated than a G&T, but I got it into my head that I would spread the good word of fancy boozing to these people. When I’d noticed a bottle of maple syrup in a supermarket in Ooty, I decided I would start with a Maple Old-Fashioned.

It was not as easy as you’d think. For a start, maple syrup is virtually unheard of in India; the fact that a rural supermarket had even had it was a minor miracle. As such, it was perhaps unsurprising that this bottle was 1000 rupees, or just under $20, more than double what it would be in Australia.

The next issue that surfaced was the procurement of Angostura bitters, which everyone seemed to recognise but no one could actually produce. Eventually, Mr Fixit discovered that there was a bottle of it at The Boss’ sister’s house, and had one of the staff run over there to collect it.

They then sourced an orange from the kitchen, and a huge butcher’s knife to peel it, and a bottle of 12 year old scotch that wasn’t quite right for Old-Fashioneds but would do the job. As I cheerfully assembled my first drink, Mr Fixit and The Boss’s valet watch me intently, with a vague air of either irritation or hurt that a guest was intruding on their domain. Once I’d made one for The Boss, Mr Fixit made one for me: I had to get him to restrain himself with the maple syrup, and be a bit more assertive with the bitters bottle, but it came out fine.