Nine arch bridge near Ella
The British love affair with tea can probably best be seen in Sri Lanka, one time island of Ceylon. Committed advocate of decolonisation as I am, I must nevertheless confess that I do find the name Ceylon more attractive and the name is far from reclusive on the island anyway, where it manifests everywhere from the national bank, to diverse businesses, hotels, retail outlets and so on.
I arrived into Colombo early evening and thankfully made it through immigration and eventually to my hotel relatively quickly, after a tiring journey that involved a twelve hour overnight stop in Dubai and another unexpected stop in Male, capital of the Maldives. From the air, the Maldives, an archipelago of some 26 atolls in the Indian Ocean, look weird, sort of like cultures in a turquoise petri dish and mostly uninhabited, so to arrive into Male, a large modern city, was rather a shock.
To dismiss Sri Lanka merely as an island of tea and tourism is actually to grossly misrepresent it, as it has an illustrious heritage independent of India and distinctly its own. It’s the place where, according to the legend made famous by the epic Sanskrit poem the Ramayana, the demon king Ravana (himself misrepresented according to some) kidnapped Sri Rama’s wife Sita and held her until she was rescued by her husband, an avatar of Sri Vishnu, none other than God (if you happen to be a Vaishnavite that is). Here the different faiths of Hinduism and Buddhism, with some Christianity, more or less shake along peacefully together, with some temples showing depictions of all three.
I have visited the tea plantations in southern India at Munnar, so the sight of expansive vistas of land devoted to the cultivation of tea was nothing new to me. The British might have gone, but their impact lives on in the many British names here: Sunderlands, Findlay, Norwood Estates, Edinburgh, Devon beer shop amongst many. The architectural style of this region reflects the British country estate aspirations of their founders, whilst the country bungalow style is ubiquitous.
After three nights in Colombo to recover, I caught the train eastwards into the southern mountain region where many of the national parks and tea plantations may be found. It was a long journey of some nine hours duration in a trundling old fashioned train which wound it’s way through spectacular scenery, climbing ever higher into the mountains, arriving into Ella shortly after nightfall.
I was thankful that I had booked a guesthouse well away from the main town, up along a lane called Waterfall Road, with magnificent views over Ella Rock and the famous waterfall itself. It was relatively peaceful here, with a rich bird life that greeted you at dawn and continued throughout the day, together with neighbourhood strimmers and the local bread and ice-cream vendors.
What I hadn’t expected was what a resort this whole region has become in recent years, especially the town Ella itself and its several neighbouring towns, which act as a magnet for holiday makers and backpackers from across the world.
It feels rather like being in a time warp here, a time before the pandemic effectively shut down tourism completely for over a year. When I left Nepal last November, there were small signs of a recovery in foreign travel under the impact of mass vaccination programmes and a little trickle of Western looking people had started to appear, much to the delight of local businesses. I remembered the time in Kathmandu when I first arrived, when I was the only conspicuous foreigner to be seen. A year on and Ella is a bustling inland resort and centre of regional travel again, swarming with tourists who can hang out drinking in clubs and bars, enjoy Italian coffee, pasta and pizza, party til dawn, and dress and behave pretty much as they please when not trekking to the several popular locations the region is famous for.
I stayed in the region for a couple of weeks before catching the train back westwards towards Colombo, breaking the journey at the famous Adam’s Peak region.
A tall, oddly shaped conical mountain some 2243 m high, Adam’s Peak is where legend has it that the Buddha (Lord Shiva for Hindus, Adam, or even St.Thomas if Christian) came to earth, leaving their footprint in the rock. It’s a real commitment to climb it, despite there being continuous flights of steps all the way up and thousands of determined visitors do throughout the year. I am not, however, one of them! At the top there is a Buddhist monastery and temple, and mantras sung at dawn by the monks echo evocatively across the entire landscape.
