Sri Lanka: Part 2

Day 3:

The hotel in Kandy was so nice and comfortable, but we had another long day ahead of us and we were packed up and checked out early again. The first stop of the day was Kandy train station where we went so see if we could get a ticket to train the second half of the trip down to Ella – from Nanu-Oya to Ella. This is a popular train trip for travelers and usually needs to be booked in advance, but as I’ve said before, we were not on top of the bookings for this part of the trip after our last few weeks in Sydney, and here we were at the train station the morning of, trying to get a last-minute ticket. We somehow got lucky and there was a cancellation, so we bought the tickets, and went out to start the drive down, or rather up toward Ella.

Ella is up in the mountains and the road out of Kandy started the climb immediately. Millie had made the move into the front seat of the car to avoid getting carsick while winding up the mountain roads, and I was left in the back seat to just take in the views. We made a couple of stops along the way where there were viewpoints of the mountains rising all around with bright green tea plantations on the hillsides and steep gorges with huge waterfalls between the peaks. As we climbed the mountain, the trees made way for tea plantations with endless even rows of short green tea bushes.

Mountains and waterfalls from viewpoint on the way up to Ella

Eventually we came to a large hotel looking building and pulled into the parking lot. This was Damro tea plantation, one of the largest tea plantations in Sri Lanka. It was surrounded by tea fields as far as we could see in every direction, and it even had a Hollywood style ‘DAMRO Tea’ sign on the opposite hillside. We went in and were greeted with a seat and free tea. This was welcomed after the early morning, and I ordered a tea cake to go with it. We couldn’t sit and enjoy the free tea for too long because we had booked a tea safari, a trip up the mountain into the tea fields in another old jeep. Millie wasn’t very excited about getting back into a car during the break from the winding mountain roads, but it was an experience we couldn’t miss.

In the safari Jeep, we had a couple of high anxiety moments passing cars and tractors on the thin, steep access road before we stopped at the top of the hill to take some photos, or at least that’s what we thought. While we were busy capturing the vivid green hillsides and getting some photos of ourselves in the tea fields, the guide pulled a couple of baskets out of the back of the jeep. He showed us the way that the tea pickers wear the basket on their head, and which leaves they pick, distinguishing between black, green and white tea leaves. Once the baskets were out, the nice photos posing in front of the beautiful landscape devolved into videos of me throwing tea leaves blindly over my head, making a surprisingly low percentage of them into the basket.

New career as a tea picker

This spot was the majority of the tour, and we took more photos picking tea leaves together, with the guide getting artsy and taking the low angle shots through the tea leaves, and Shan taking photos on our phones with some horrendous filters applied. We drove a bit further up the hill for some more tea knowledge, stopping where they had a few different types of tea plant. We knew that black, green and white tea all came from the same plant, but we are not the biggest tea connoisseurs, so the different types of tea plant used to make silver and gold tea were new to us. The safari then finished back at the starting building with a quick tour of the processing factory where they grind, cook and bag the tea before taking it down to the tea auctions. It expensive for what it was, but overall it was a fun safari where we took some nice photos and learned something new.

More tea picking photos

The tea plantation was our only stop before the train. We thought it would take longer and were probably a bit too eager to get on the train because we arrived at the station about an hour early, and the train was 30 minutes late on top of that. Eventually we got on the train, and we had great seats in a front row and on the left side of the train which was supposed to have the best views. This had really worked out well for a couple of last-minute tickets, and I joked that Millie must have wished for this at the Sacred Tooth Temple the day before. She hadn’t, but we were still very lucky with this trip. Once the train finally arrived, Shan left us to drive to the station at Ella while we coasted off at a steady 40 kmph on the train.

It was the slowest train I’ve ever been on, but it’s probably the right speed because the doors were perpetually open with locals and tourists hanging out of them (including us), and the tracks were busy with people walking on and beside the tracks, using them as a path through the jungle. We had the next three hours to just enjoy the views and to take turns getting pictures while hanging out the doors. We probably took two hundred photos while on the train, and the journey lived up to all the hype with incredible views on both sides of the tea fields, mountains, and the small villages in between. We probably should have planned better, because this was one of the main things we wanted to do in Sri Lanka, and we would probably be planning a trip back if we had missed it. Luckily everything worked out and the journey fully exceeded our expectations.

Ella was a bit different from the other towns we had been in thus far as it’s mostly a backpacker town with bright signs, restaurants and bars serving burgers, pizza and Mexican food, and every other building was a hostel or hotel. When we made it into Ella from the train station, we went straight for dinner. It was early, but we had skipped lunch for the train ride, and we were getting hungry. We were really enjoying all the local curries, so when we pulled up in front of what looked like a backpacker bar called ‘Rocky Ella Café’, we didn’t really know what to expect. But behind the burgers, pizza and other western food on the menu, there was a couple of Sri Lankan dishes, including a prawn curry and a chopped roti dish called kottu. Despite the appearances, the Sri Lankan food was great, and the prawn curry was Millie’s favourite meal in Sri Lanka.

After Dinner we went up to the accommodation, which was a villa tucked back into the mountains behind Ella. It was a short drive on more narrow, winding roads, then we reached a point where a car can’t go any further. The people running the hotel had a tuk tuk that drove us the final five hundred meters up to the reception. Then from there we still had to climb another hundred meters up a hill to get to the villa. They brought our bags up the hill, and we were able to just relax for a bit before getting to bed early again.

Day 4:

The next day we woke up at 4 am to hike up a mountain for sunrise. The Tuk tuk met us at reception, and after picking up Shan, drove us down through Ella and up the hill on the other side. We passed a couple of groups of backpackers hiking up from Ella village, adding a couple of kms to each side of the hike where we only had about 2km each way. It was a steep 2 kms and Shan was not in hiking shape so there were a few stops on the way up, but we made it up to the summit of Little Adams Peak just as it was getting lighter about twenty minutes from sunrise. It was just light enough for us to see the views from the peak, down to where the mountains dropped off toward the sea and into a thick layer of clouds below. There were a few too many clouds for a bright colourful sunrise, but there was a bit of orange off in the distance, and we still enjoyed the views and soft morning light.

Although we couldn’t see the sun through the clouds, once it was clear that the sunrise was done, we walked back down to the tuk tuk to drive over to the next site, the nine arches bridge. This is a popular spot that we had been fed on Instagram and was another item on the ‘do not miss’ list that we had not researched beyond seeing it in Instagram stories about Sri Lanka. Shan dampened our hopes of seeing the bridge the day before when he informed us that they were filming a Bollywood movie, and the bridge was closed. We pushed him to check, and it turned out that the movie was on a break from filming so we could go after all.

We weren’t thinking about the train schedule when we drove down, and we arrived about forty-five minutes before the train was scheduled to pass through. We walked across the bridge on the tracks like the locals we had seen while on the train the day before and set up our photos on the other side. This was the best view of bridge, and it was picturesque to see the bridge surrounded by the dense jungle and slowly being illuminated as the sun rose up above the hillside. When the train finally came, we could hear it about two minutes before it arrived, which gave us a chance to make sure we were all set for the photos. We had everything planned from our time waiting - I had the good camera, Shan had my phone to take photos and Millie had her phone to take a video. We captured every moment of the train slowly passing over the bridge with people hanging out the doors and windows until the train disappeared into a tunnel on the other side.

Train across the Nine Arches Bridge

With all our morning excursions complete, we hopped back into the tuk tuk and took a shortcut back to the hotel through some roads that only a tuk tuk can travel. We made it back to the hotel before 8 am, and had breakfast delivered to our room shortly after. Our villa also had a private pool, so we had a slow morning, with a quick swim, despite the cold water in the pool. Then we got ourselves packed up to head down the hill toward the beach just after 11 am. Heading down the hill, we were back on a winding mountain road, driving down under the mountain that we had climbed earlier in the morning. We took a quick stop to have a look at a waterfall right next to the road about halfway down the hill. Then we stopped at another waterfall that we could see on google maps and looked like it was just off the road. When we parked, the sign said the waterfall was fifty meters away, but this turned out to be fifty meters of vertical. The waterfall was only a small cascade with a good pool underneath. There were some locals swimming in their underwear, but we didn’t plan on joining them. Disappointed in this one, we started walking back up the hill. It was a steep climb, and Shan was complaining more than either of us, so I don’t think he will be taking any future guests to that one.

We continued down the hill, eventually coming to the flat straight roads out toward the beach. We stopped at a little fruit stand for a snack to get us through to dinner, but this seemed to make Shan hungry, because he was asking if we needed anything else, and are we sure we would be ok with just fruit for lunch. Millie was enjoying her bag of pineapple, and obliviously saying we’re all good, but I picked up that Shan wanted to eat something and agreed to share a curd with him. Curd is a Sri Lankan yogurt made from buffalo milk, and they eat it with a coconut sugar syrup that they call honey. I had it at breakfast in Kandy, and enjoyed it, but this little shack on the side of the road with no running water or power was far from the hotel buffet where I had tried curd previously. Millie didn’t find the thought of eating a dairy product that had been sitting on a shelf in thirty-degree heat at a small wood shack appetizing, so it was just Shan and me. The old guy who ran the shack brought out some plastic chairs and some small glass ice cream dishes for us to eat from. It was a bit of a risk, but I was willing to take part in this authentic cultural food experience for the comfort of our driver. I really enjoyed the curd and had three bowls. I didn’t get sick from it either, so overall a very positive experience.

Lunch at the curd shack

After we were all fed, we continued the trip down toward the beach at Unawatuna. The rain set in about thirty minutes from the beach, but it was the start of wet season in Sri Lanka, and we had already been very lucky with three beautiful sunny days. Unawatuna was another backpacker beach town where Shan dropped us off before heading straight back out to his accommodation. We went for a little walk in the rain to scope out what looked good for dinner and ended up at a little seafood place on the beach. Both of us were inspired by Millie’s prawn curry the night before, so I ordered a plate of grilled prawns in Sri Lankan spices, and Millie ordered a fish curry that was a similar style to the prawn curry. Although it wasn’t as good as our meal in Ella, it was still great food.

When we made it back to the room, it had stopped raining, so I couldn’t help but put on some swimmers and went straight back out for a swim before it got dark. We were both exhausted after the early morning and ready to call it a night at about 7pm, but we were trying to get off our Sydney sleep schedule now, so we went out for a walk to see the town and stay awake a bit longer. It was really a one street backpacker town, lined with hostels, bars and restaurants catered to a western pallet, similar to Ella. The main differences were the hot, humid weather now that we had come down from the mountains, and the smell of salt in the air from the beach just behind the row of shops along the road.