From Kandy we headed up into the hill country. The thing we'd looked forward to most on this stretch was the slow train to Ella — the famous one where people hang out of the open doorway with the tea hills behind them. We could have just driven with our team, but we'd booked the train specially, so we took it.
A quick practical note if you ever want to do it: these tickets sell out within minutes and have to be booked about a month ahead. We were lucky — Line's colleagues back home sorted ours through their local partner, along with the hotel in Kandy. Because of the big floods the year before, the train no longer runs the whole way from Kandy, so you join it further up at Nanu Oya (near Nuwara Eliya). We had lunch in Nuwara Eliya first, at a well-reviewed place; the food was fine, though Noah's chicken came out undercooked and he had to send it back twice — something we'd think about again a few days later when he got properly ill.
The train to Ella
The train goes very slowly, which is what lets you stand in the open doorway and watch the hills go by. In practice there's a constant gentle competition among the passengers for doorway time whenever a good view opens up. You also have to be careful: there are narrow tunnels and rock cuttings close to the track, and if you're looking at your camera instead of where you're going you can get hurt.
Noah's action camera stopped working right when he needed it, so his filming got stressful and rushed, and in the end he decided he'd rather just enjoy the view than fight for the doorway. Honestly, it's a nice ride and we're glad we did it, but it wasn't quite the highlight we'd expected — we'd already seen a lot of the same scenery from the car. Our photos ended up somewhere in the middle: not the best, but not the worst either.
A bit more of the ride, Noah and Jesper in the doorway:
Arriving in Ella
We were met at Ella by our guide and chauffeur and driven to our guesthouse, Ella Riverfront. Getting down there was an adventure in itself: the last stretch off the main road was narrow, steep and stony, not really made for the van — at one point the chauffeur wouldn't drive back up without our weight in the back over the rear wheels, so we all piled in for the climb. Worth it, though: our room was up top with the finest view from the balcony, right across the valley to Ella Rock and Little Adam's Peak.
Our first stop, though, was actually the hospital: we took Vitus in to have his toe looked at — the one he'd hurt back in Kuala Lumpur. It had got infected, so it was cleaned up and he was put on penicillin, two kinds, three or four times a day. Good that we got it checked. Then we ate dinner in town at a genuinely excellent little Sri Lankan place, a spread of different curries and rice.
A word on Ella itself: it's a very touristy town — loud, lots of high music, tourist restaurants everywhere — a big contrast to the more authentic places we'd stayed. Not really our kind of town, and finding normal good food at normal prices took some effort, but we managed.
Little Adam's Peak
After a slow morning — we were tired, and Noah filmed some disc-golf videos on the balcony — we had lunch in town at Mom's Kitchen, plus an ice cream that cost about as much as a whole lunch but was worth it. Then we walked up Little Adam's Peak, a decent hike that gets steep near the end.
On the way up you pass a colossal, wildly over-touristed hotel-and-pool complex where you can pay a small fortune for a VIP ticket — about the most touristy thing we'd ever seen. Higher up there's a paid "scenic route": a skywalk on a net strung between the trees a metre or two off the ground, on the side of the hill with no actual view, plus a tightrope and a zipline — expensive and very short, some of them only ten or fifteen seconds in the air. We skipped all of it and just walked to the top, where the view is genuinely lovely, took the obligatory family photo, and Noah filmed his summit disc-golf shot as he does at every peak.
The frisbee stunt at Nine Arches Bridge
From there we walked over to Nine Arches Bridge, one of Ella's iconic sights — a nice little hike in between fields, throwing the blue frisbee (the Kastaplast disc from Kuala Lumpur) down the path as we went.
The boys had a plan: stand on opposite sides of the tracks and throw the disc over the train as it crossed the bridge, and film it. The train was delayed several times, so while we waited they threw the disc into the tunnel for practice. When it finally came they got their shots — a couple of throws back and forth over the train, and one where Noah throws to Vitus who "catches" it. For the record, Vitus didn't quite catch it and didn't throw it back cleanly, but you can't tell on the video, so we're calling it a success. Very touristy, lots of other tourists, but great fun.
First the throw over the train as it crossed the bridge:
And Noah throwing the disc into the tunnel while we waited for it to arrive:
We made our usual mistake at dinner — went back to the good place from the first night and found it disappointing second time round, the curries not as good. Worse, our lime juices tasted odd, and being polite we kept drinking until we realised the kitchen had swapped the sugar for salt: we'd each drunk a glass of very salty juice. The boys luckily hadn't finished theirs; Line and Jesper drained ours, and Jesper finished Noah's too. No refund was offered, which soured it a bit, so we stopped at a shop for water and chocolate to wash the salt away.
Climbing Ella Rock
From up on Little Adam's we'd spotted Ella Rock and decided to climb it the next morning — a hike of around nine kilometres round trip, fairly steep. Vitus stayed behind at the guesthouse because his bandaged toe was sore and shouldn't get dirty, so Line, Noah and Jesper went. The woman at the guesthouse desk kindly showed us a shortcut that halved it to about five kilometres each way; a good chunk of the route follows the railway line, which means either very big or very small steps between the sleepers. On the way we passed the classic Sri Lankan work scene — six men standing and watching two men actually working on the track.
Noah pushed through a headache the whole way up — it turned out he'd had it since the evening before but hadn't mentioned it, an early sign of what was coming. But it was worth it — hard and sweaty, with a big view over the whole valley from the top. We sat up there a while by the Ellarock Eco Tourism Zone sign, which shows the usual price difference between local and foreign visitors.
One thing Jesper couldn't stop noticing up here: the tea plants are all pruned into low, gnarled, flat-topped shapes — basically bonsai dimensions. He grows bonsai at home, so in the tea fields he saw bonsai potential everywhere, whole hillsides of it, every single plant already trained to roughly the right size. Digging one up as yamadori would be another matter, though: tea has deep roots, and getting a plant like this to survive after being lifted would be very hard.
Back down, we showered, met up with Vitus, packed, and set off on the long drive down to the coast at Arugam Bay. That's the next post: surfing, a wild elephant by the road, and Noah getting a lot worse.
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