Down, Down, Down

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Nuwara Eliya to Ramboda Falls to Pussellawa to Gampola
Kilometres: 63.5 Elevation gain/loss: 1186m/2659m


The route down from Nuwara Eliya promised spectacular views, stunning vistas over tea plantations and rippling mountains falling away below me as I walked. But promises are not always kept... As soon as I hit Toppass, a few kilometres out of town, I was enshrouded in thick - THICK - fog, the dense clouds sitting smack on my head, making it difficult to see the oncoming traffic and for them to see me, so I found myself diving into the roadside ditch on more than one occasion to avoid an unobservant truck.

For several hours little improved, with a complete whiteout hiding everything but the sight of my own feet in front of me. I reached a small rest house and was offered their finest room, the one with the huge windows looking out over the dramatic scenery. This was the view for the best part of the day:

Only by late afternoon had enough of the cloud lifted to offer a glimpse of all that I had been missing.

And by evening, the same clouds that had ruined my morning view put on a dramatic show.

The following morning I continued down to Ramboda, famed for its huge waterfalls. From the road, the public view of the falls is impressive, but the messy little town that the road passes through, with its profusion of tea stalls and greasy restaurants, the noisy families of picnickers bathing in the falls, the litter of discarded shampoo packets and empty water bottles, all detract from its beauty. It's a sad reality that many of Sri Lankas most picturesque spots are being ruined by a complete lack of environmental sensitivity, and I quickly moved on.

If you continue down the road a few hundred meters, on your left you will come to the Ramboda Falls Hotel, the town's one "expensive" hotel. The lower levels of the hotel and the viewing area of the restaurant offer unbeatable views of the bottom of the falls, which can't be seen from any other position along the road, and it's well worth a small detour here even if you don't plan to spend the night.

One need not worry too much about seeing this particular set of falls or another, for several unnamed, unfamous, but lovely little waterfalls tumble down along the route, each with its own charms and most ignored by the cars speeding past.

The cool damp climate is a tea grower's paradise, and the flanks of the hills are carpeted in the green of tea bushes. Huge plantations like that of Labookelie and Rothschild dominate for miles around. In between, where there are villages, gardens are awash with colour and young boys run alongside the road to flag down traffic and sell their bouquets of bright flowers.

As you descend further from Pussellawa, the temperatures noticeably rise, the clouds are left behind, and the sun comes out again. Fruit stands display their luscious wares, pomellos and avocados and cocoa, and roadside vendors offer up boiled corn.

Eventually, I hobbled into Gampolat at the base of the hills. Little more than a transit point out of the high country and into Kandy, it offers little for the tourist, but I had come 64 kilometres from Nuwara Eliya in two days and was knackered. Accommodation is extremely limited in Gampola, but I managed to find a humble yet adequate home-stay. My 84 year old hostess, a sweet old woman with the short-term memory of Dory (the blue tang fish in Finding Nemo), kept me amused. We had this conversation no less that seven times:

Will you have chicken for dinner?
No, I'm vegetarian.
Will you have sausages?
No, I'm vegetarian.
What do you want for dinner?
Vegetables.
Will you have some chicken?

I humoured her. Hell, with the semi-permeable, molten-cheese like excuse for a memory I have, it's a future I can look forward to myself.

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.

Passion and Piercings

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Haputale to Diyaluma Falls
Kilometers: 5 Elevation gain/loss: 582/600

Haputale sits perched on the edge of steep tea plantations, tucked romantically in the fold of the ribboning mountainside, looking from a distance like a little Shangri-la. It's suddenly cooler, mistier, and decidedly unlike the tropical south. You notice immediately that the palm and banana trees have given way to exotic pine and eucalyptus, brought in (disastrously) by the British. Of course, now nothing else will grow in those forests, local flora unable to coexist, but hey... it seemed like a good idea at the time.

You also notice that the ubiquitous Buddhist temples of the Singhalese low-lands are fewer and farther between, and instead roadside Hindu temples to the gods Shiva and his son Murgan begin to dominate. At the base of convoluted and entwined fig trees, impromptu shrines with lingams and tridents are a clear sign that you are in an area heavily populated with Tamils.

Almost exclusively, the Tamil women work the tea fields, and the men the tea factories, all (relatively recent) arrivals from India who migrated under British colonial rule. These communities are distinct from the Tamils of Colombo and Jaffna, who have lived in - and once ruled - Sri Lanka for millennia.

Haputale demands a day trip or two, a walk through the tea estates blanketed in the curling mists, a tour of a tea factory, a photo taken where Mr. Synonymous-with-Tea Lipton used to sit to oversea his empire, and a side trip to the nearest waterfalls.

I headed to Diyaluma falls. From below, is a tall, skinny waterfall, the second highest in the country. You take a snapshot. You move on. From the top, for those willing to slog out the steep climb, it offers stunning and pristine pools, perfect for a quick swim to wash off the sweat of the hike. Always up for a stomp, I knew which way I was going.

To reach the top, head about 500 meters west, where a dirt road heads left, uphill, skirting the outside perimeter of a rubber tree plantation. The road slopes up gently for about a kilometer, to a small village where you will be met by any number of small boys, all keen to show you the way for a tip of few hundred rupees. Definitely let the kids lead you, as the route winds confusingly through the houses and behind a tiny rubber factory, where you can see sheets of raw rubber hanging out to dry, and then heads up the steep hills behind. No fools, these kids, they stop before the difficult part of the climb and point you to the top, to manage on your own.

I had trudged my way up to the top, enjoyed the lovely pools, and was coming back down when the day suddenly turned from scenic to fascinating. Passing through a tiny Hindu village, I stumbled across a festival under way. The entire population was out, colourfully dressed, horns blowing and drums pounding, and the energy of the crowd was completely electric. To the urging of the crowd, women began to sway and shake, driving themselves into trance, some fainting, and losing all normal sense of propriety. One by one, as their possession became more furious, men, women, even children, were grabbed by the hair by the priest and dragged into a small flowing stream. A cloth was then thrown over their heads to hide what was occurring, and they emerged tongue or cheeks skewered by metal rods, or backs pierced with hooks. All seemed unaffected by any pain, caught up in the intoxication and fervor of the ritual, and there was not a drop of blood.

With dozens thus impaled, a procession then lead to the Murgan temple, where the exhausted devotees, drenched with buckets of cooling water, collapsed from the emotional experience. Such powerful Hindu festivals stand in sharp contrast to the placid and controlled experience one has at the Buddhist festivals, where people calmly watch performers or privately complete their own quiet worship. Good old Shiva and sons, however, always put on an amazing show, full of theatre and drama and heavy doses of human passion.