Breakfast at the Sunny Hills was a little different this morning, we got freshly made roti instead of the usual white toast. The food was great, but the elderly proprietor stood and watched us eat our breakfast. That meant we couldn’t fart and burp as usual and say what we really thought of his crappy guest house.
After much research we found that the train to Nuwara Elya left at 8.45, it takes four hours and (very importantly) it has toilets. So we went to the station and bought two unreserved, the reserved tickets having long sold out. There was a scramble among the many tourists when the train arrived, and all the seats were rapidly taken. Standing up for four hours is worse than even Southern Trains, so we wrote off the 350 rupees we spent on the train tickets and got a taxi. A sissy solution I know, but it was £40 very well spent.
Our driver was very good on the windy mountain roads as we wound up to the highest town in Sri Lanka. We stopped off at the Blue Fields tea factory, a ninety five year old corrugated iron building painted blue. Much of the equipment in original including a generator made by Ruston in Lincoln! A young lady gave us a tour and described the process of wilting, crushing and rolling, fermenting, drying and sieving the tea. Its is then sold at auctions in Colombo and gets blended to suit different tastes.
At the factory they make black tea (the sort we like) green tea (which is unfermented and less oxidised) and white tea. White tea is made from the best shoots and is used for medicinal purposes. At the end of the tour we were given a lovely cup of Orange Pekoe tea.
Nuwara Elya is an old British hill station where people colonials would come to escape the summer heat. It has a golf course, a race track and even a choice of pubs! My kinda town. We are staying at the Richmond hotel, which is much nicer looking than those we have stayed in so far. With a telly that gets BBC World News.
After settling in we walked in the lovely Victoria Park in the centre of the town, another colonial legacy still being enjoyed today. The town has a more suburban feel than other Sri Lankan towns, and has is surrounded by mountains. The guide books says it feels like England, but that isn’t true.
timharnesstravels 