There is nowhere like Nuwara Eliya
Day 6, Nuwara Eliya
We awoke in our adorable Nuwara Eliya A-frame cabin with a bit of a chill, on account of there being no heating and it quite a chilly part of Sri Lanka. We were actually awoken with a bit of a start, to a heavy knocking on the door. I quickly realised this was our breakfast and we hadn’t set an alarm so I threw on some boxers and tentatively opened the door a crack to ask for a minute. She forcefully opened the door and brought through a tray of breakfast, completely unperturbed by my pale semi-nakedness and explained we should mix the rice noodles with the daal and coconut samba and eat it with our hands. I proceeded to do so with gusto while Billie had an extra 15 mins in bed.
Our ‘hideout cabin’ was actually located on the Pedro Estate, and so we were surrounded by beautiful tea plants on hilly surrounding terrain. Lovely! After breakfast, we met with our host, Pubudu, who was the chap who runs the Airbnb, and quite the entrepreneur! He had arranged the building of the cabin, manages it, has a photography business AND works for Microsoft in the capital… He’s only 19 years old. We expressed our interest to hike to Lovers Leap Waterfall and then visit Pedro Tea Factory and enquired as to the best way of doing it. He declared he would come with us and ran in and grabbed his drone, which we discussed at great length. Just up the path his little brother (apparently 16 but 12 max) joined us, with the remote control and rotors for the drone. They were such lovely siblings and chatted and laughed the whole way.
As we walked through the tea plantation roads, we encountered villages where plantation workers and their families lived. ALL the children and even many of the adults waved at us and said hello and we waved and said hello back. It weirdly felt like minor celebrity stuff; I imagine they don’t get many tourists passing through these roads. A biker gang of 6 to 10 year old even followed us for a while. We arrived at the bottom of Lovers Leap just over an hour later and Billie and I went to climb the rocks and some local guys taking modelesque pictures, probably for their Tinder profiles, offered to take a snap of us. We kept it relatively low key.
We returned to Pubudu and brother who said we should climb to the top cos that was the really cool bit. They said it was medium difficulty. As we progressed, Pubudu admitted it was a bit harder than he remembered as the trail took some more serious uphill climbing. The way there wasn’t too bad but I was already voicing my worries to Bill regarding the descent… I’m not good with heights. We reached the top, took some snaps and refilled our water bottles (they use the river lower down as a source so it was OK to drink). Then Pubudu whipped out the drone and got some sexy shots from afar. Having previously explained my drone experience he passed me the controls to set up a shot and we got a nice one with the four of us sitting together.
Just as some other Brits arrived, we headed back down. I managed pretty well, but there was one particularly terrifying bit which I was finding hard. A nice local fellow was coming up and did a fab job of helping me down, moving my foot for me to new footholds and always asking me if I was OK. I got down relieved and thanked him greatly. It was not quite the selfless act of kindness as I believed as he asked me for 100 rupees (about 40p…worth it). I happily gave him 120 and he was so happy he stroked my beard with both hands. It was a surreal but comforting thing to experience. In a short amount of time I had gone from B list celeb to incredibly sweaty man terrified of small descent having beard stroked. This world can do a 180 on you people… Things got better when we met puppies…
We hiked back down and parted ways with Pubs and bro as we jumped in a Tuk Tuk to the Pedro Tea Factory. We paid a few quid, donned some aprons and joined about 6 other tourists for the tour of the factory. I won’t bore you with every single part of the process but basically they dry it lots, cut it to different sizes, dry it again, clean it then package it up. A few interesting facts: 95% of tea made by the plantations HAS to be auctioned to the brands to brand up and sell. They also do all the infusing. The Pedro estate themselves are only allowed to package and sell 5% of their own product, which they do in their shop. I assume this law exists to benefit the big branded names (Lipton, Twinnings etc) and the Government probably get a sweet financial deal out of it too. Second interesting fact is that the tea pickers (often elderly ladies, I understand) get 805 rupees for a full 8 hour day in the fields, around £3.50 Not a lot! Sri Lanka can seen cheap for the odd tuk tuk or bottle of water, but it’s one of the more expensive South Asian countries.
We then went for high tea at the Grand Hotel… The fanciest place around with doormen in posh uniforms and the like. Colonial influence at its absolute finest. High tea consisted of mini desserts, mains (including cucumber sandwich) and desserts. Most interesting was the selection of teas, I had Prince of Kandy while Billie went for a ginger classic. They were 10/10 tasty teas.
At this point it started looking a bit miserable so we tuk tuk’d back to the cabin to enjoy the upstairs ‘chill area’ with its cool windows and made some book progress (more on that below). All in all, a lovely day.
Day 7, Nuwara Eliya
So Nuwara Eliya is known as ‘Little England’ as every single Sri Lankan who knows you’re English will tell you, grinning. The big lake is Lake Gregory, there are roads called ‘Queen Elizabeth Road’ and ‘Lady Horton Drive’. (on a side note, my favourite road name in Nuwara Eliya was ‘Unique View Road’. The view was not that great). Around Lake Gregory the grass is kept ever so well and if it weren’t for the fact you were surrounded by tree plantations, mountains and everything else Sri Lankan, I suppose you could say it looked a bit English. What WAS a bit more English were two things: the weather (16 degrees… practically freezing, and some rain) and a village area called Little England Cottages. This area (pictured below) contains English style houses in a private complex. It is bizarre and just looks wrong, really. They’ve nailed the English house look, though.
We set off at about 9:30. We had arranged with our Tuk Tuk driver to meet us at our cabin to take us to ‘Single Tree Mountain’ (or One Tree Hill as we called it). He took us to the bottom of a path and up we went, winding uphill between tea plants. It was all uphill for quite sometime so I started to flag and Billie did a fab job of her usual confidence boosting / coerce me up a hill. She has become quite a master of this dance. About an hour or so later we came to the top where there were a load of pylons (definitely more than one tree, too… more like several thousand tree mountain. A security guard for the pylons bumped into us and lead us too a good viewpoint. We kind of guessed which tree was the ‘single’ but it really could have been any number of them…
We descended via a mountain path that seemed to be the only way to go. We saw wild chickens, the animal shown on the Sri Lankan flag, but they were too flighty to get a pic. As a chicken lover, enthusiast and father, I am determined to picture one before we leave the island. Eventually we came out through a small village onto ‘Unique View Road’… As previously mentioned, not that great. We swang by the Grand Hotel for a pizza (sometimes you just need pizza) and a beer (ditto) before making out way to the train station for departure to Ella.
The train journey from Nuwara Eliya to Ella is famously THE most beautiful train journey in Sri Lanka. By pure chance our ‘observation class seats’ happened to be the best on the train… Right at the back with huge windows in front of us… and extra leg room. We settled down for a beautiful journey.
Book review
Ooh, completely forgot about this! I finished John Grisham’s ‘The Racketeer’ and must say it was very gripping with unexpected twists and turns. His knowledge of law is impeccable and does lend the story some believability and further interest. Only cons are how American it feels: short snappy cool guy with unrealistic joke cracking with the feds. Anyway, still felt cool, but would grate on me before long. I plan to read a few more of his books when I return so I’m giving this a solid 7/10.
That’ll do me for today! I’ll start the next post off as we arrive in our homestay in Ella. We’re planning to go on many hikes: Billie might have her morale boosting work cut out for her…