Little England

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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.

Fog and Cold on Horton Plains

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Horton Plains World's End/Baker's Falls Loop to Pattipola
Kilometres: 23 Elevation gain/loss: 603m/923m

Horton Plains offers scenery unlike anywhere else in Sri Lanka, a combination of windswept grassy moors, bogs and dense forests, more like what you would expect someplace in Scotland rather than on a tropical island 6 degrees from the equator. It's stark, bleak, the colours muted and the soil blackened. The kind of place you'd expect to find a tormented Heathcliff standing atop a crag, cape flapping in the wutheringness.

Scene from the movie

Horton Plains

I'm Canadian. From the Great White North. Land of blizzards and ice storms, igloos and the world's finest ice hockey teams. I'm supposed to be genetically able to handle the cold. My national identity demands it. But not so. Doubly not so when it's foggy, dark and windy. Horton Plains can serve up a bitter chill so by mid-afternoon we were happy to get indoors, although staying in the drafty, mist-swaddled Maha Eliya bungalow was anything but cosy. Hot, heaping servings of instant packet noodles (my grandmother's secret recipe) put a little heat in our tums, but we spent the night tucked under sleeping bags and four blankets each, still in our fleeces and fuzzy woolly hats.

By morning, most of the clouds and fog had lifted, promising clear (enough) views if we could get to the cliff edge early. After 9:00 or 10:00 a.m., the clouds will usually roll in again obscuring any view down below. From the Farr Inn (no longer an inn, now the information centre) at the centre of the park, it's about a 10-11 kilometre loop to World's End, the dramatic drop off which overlooks Belihul Oya some 1000 meters below, on to Baker's Falls, and back again. Circular, it's impossible to get lost on the route, which is well sign-posted at any junction, and in fact it's forbidden to walk off route to protect the fragile ecosystem. The beauty of Horton Plains, though, is not just the spots where everyone - and I do mean everyone - whips out their cameras and takes the mandatory shots (see pics below). The beauty is in the wide open spaces, the long, undulating grasslands, and the completely "other" feel it has. One thing you'll note, thanks again to the ever-guilty British, is the presence (infestation) of invasive, exotic species which are now near impossible to eradicate.

World's End

Baker's Falls

One joy of walking is that you make almost no noise, and so the wildlife doesn't take off running as you approach. You also go at a pace which allows you to really see, to look into the trees and find the bear monkeys, or get up close to a sambar, or watch a tiny lizard burying her eggs in the ground, things you can't do from inside a comfortable, speeding metal box. In the dim light of the foggy plains, it's easy to miss the wildlife, but it abounds. Horton Plains is unique in the country, the only national park you can actually walk through, and that alone is enough to earn it top marks.

From the exit gate of the park, it's a steady six kilometres downhill to Pattipola, the highest train station in the country, a pretty little depot that takes unusual pride in its display, with cheerful florals, and a dapper little station master who, quite obviously, daily polishes the antique-but-still-working-fine tablet machines. Unchanged from when the British first built the railroads into the hill country, key-like tablets are taken from and exchanged with each passing train to ensure there are no collision. The system has been used for hundreds of years, but hey, if it ain't broke...

Here in Pattipola, my friends departed home, and I spent a not uncomfortable night having rented a room in a local family home. There are no "proper" guest houses in Pattipola, so you take what you can get and are grateful for it. I had no complaints, but by morning - another long walk ahead of me - I was gone.