Pattipola to Nuwara Eliya
Kilometres: 20 Elevation gain/loss: 452m/476m
Leaving Pattipola, it's a few kilometers down before you come to charming, pastoral Ambewela farms, with its grassy hillocks and black 'n white cows happily munching to their hearts' content. On a clear day, or a clear moment when the fog lifts, you can even see the windmills that power their whole operation turning away. You'd think for a second you were in Devon.
The road continues on, through the Hakgala Strict Nature Reserve, a quiet and - from what I saw - largely unvisited forest, and past the Kande Ela Reservoir, its lonely boats abandoned at the side of the shore. Not a soul around.
Further along the road still, cross one hill and Shazaam! you are properly back in civilization. Well, not "civilization" per se, that would require a Starbucks, more like "cultivation". Cabbages are the first to carpet the landscape, quickly followed by cauliflowers, carrots and leeks. I was walking through - for a vegetarian such as myself - food paradise, every acre of land brimming with crunchy, roughage goodness. Terraced hillsides patchworked with dark green kales and yellow flowering beans make for stunning scenery, and it seemed most of the villagers were out harvesting their crops, bundling them into sacks and trucks, to be sent down to Dambulla, the central vegetable distribution point for the whole country. What was for sale at the roadside vendors were the scabby rejects, wilted and deformed, which hadn't made the quality control cut.
Here's one thing I just love about Sri Lanka - it has place names which go beyond the absurd, ridiculous sounding words, polysyllabic tongue twisters that make map reading so much fun. Down south, you have the almost-palindromic "Unawatuna". In the middle of the country there's the wrap-your-mouth-around "Maradankadawala". But here? Here I found my favourite village name in all of Sri Lanka, the sound of which just makes me hum. I had entered "Meepillimana". Go on... say it without smiling, I dare you.
After that, another seven or eight kilometres brought me into Nuwara Eliya, which has a decidedly English feel to it, helped not in small part by the Tudor houses and manicured gardens. There are wild roses adorning trellises and snap-dragons planted at the base of lamposts. There's a racetrack for the horses and pine trees line the roads.
There are golf lawns and ponies trotting the streets. It's cool and cloudy, and often rains, and everyone carries a brolly, just in case. There are fancy hotels where you must dress elegantly for dinner or you won't be let in, and convent schools for the children. Oh and there's the tea... of course, the tea. So it tickled me no end to see this most-British of admonitions in the local park:
The road from Pattipola had undulated and for every few hundred meters I descended, around the bend I found I was climbing back up, so I hadn't lost much altitude in reaching Nuwara Eliya. To leave, I had just one final climb up to the Shantipura and aptly-named Toppass villages, the highest in the country, which sit at the edge of the forested Pidurutalagala mountain (at 2524m, the tallest in Sri Lanka), and after that, there would nothing but delicious, glorious downhill all the way into Kandy.
No comments:
Post a Comment