Nuwara Eliya & the tea estates

Nuwara Eliya is sold on a phrase. "Little England" turns up on hotel signs, in brochures and in the opening line of almost everything written about the place, and it does an efficient job of getting people up the hill. A cool town of hedges and chimneys and roses at nineteen hundred metres, with a golf course, a racecourse and a red brick post office, is a strange thing to find in a tropical country, and the strangeness sells.

The phrase is also why so many visitors come away flat. They arrive expecting a piece of England, find a busy Sri Lankan hill town with some Tudor gables scattered through it, walk round the lake, photograph the post office and decide after two hours that they have done Nuwara Eliya and that it was oversold. On those terms they are not wrong. What survives of the hill station is modest: a golf course, a few good buildings, a fine Victorian park and a climate that requires a jumper. It is pleasant. It is not worth two days.

What is worth two days is the thing the phrase makes invisible. This town sits in the middle of the largest piece of manufactured landscape in the country, made over a century and a half by an industry that cleared a mountain forest, brought in a workforce to replace it, and left behind both the most photographed scenery on the island and a community whose position in it took until living memory to settle. The tea is not the backdrop to the hill station. The hill station was built for the convenience of the people who ran the tea. Put the emphasis there instead and the region stops being a thin afternoon and becomes one of the most interesting places a visitor can spend time.

What "Little England" actually was

The town began as a health resort. British officials and soldiers posted to the lowlands got ill, and the standard nineteenth-century treatment for someone who had got ill in the tropics was to send them somewhere cold. A plain high in the central mountains, ringed by peaks and reliably chilly, was what the medical thinking of the day called for, and a sanatorium and a road followed.

What turned a sanatorium into a town was the plantations. Once the hills around had been cleared and planted, the district filled with British planters living in isolation on estates, and they needed somewhere to come down to. Nuwara Eliya became that place. It acquired a club, a golf course, a racecourse, hotels, a post office and a season, and it was laid out and planted in a way calculated to remind homesick men of somewhere else.

This explains the shape of what you find. The town was never built for the people who lived and worked in the district; it was built as a retreat from them, which is why the surviving hill station is almost entirely leisure buildings. Two towns occupy the same valley, built for different purposes, and neither has been tidied away for your benefit.

Why people leave disappointed

The mock-Tudor is thinner than it looks in pictures. There are a few genuinely fine old buildings, some good early twentieth-century hotels, the post office with its clock tower and a scattering of gabled frontages. There is also a great deal of recent pastiche, put up on hotels and shops in the last few decades because the half-timbered look is what the brochures promised.

Between and behind the picturesque bits is a provincial market town doing a brisk trade in vegetables, with traffic, hoardings, unfinished concrete, a bus stand that fills the air with diesel and litter along the busier stretches of lakeside. None of that is unusual or shameful. It only jars because the marketing set up a comparison the town was never going to win.

The practical consequence is worth stating plainly. Drive up, spend two hours on the town centre and drive on, and you will have had a mediocre day and will tell people the place is overrated. The town is an afternoon. The region is the reason to come, and it rewards two or three days.

How the hills came to look like this

Almost none of the landscape you have come to photograph is natural. Before the nineteenth century these slopes carried montane rainforest: wet, mossy, slow-growing, full of species that exist nowhere else and quite unlike the lowland jungle most visitors picture. It was cut down, and the cutting was done in a rush.

Coffee came first. Planters bought or were granted upland forest, cleared it with imported labour, and for a few decades coffee made the colony's economy. Then a fungal leaf blight arrived and destroyed it. Within a single generation coffee was finished, and the planters who survived the collapse replanted their cleared hillsides with tea, which suited the altitude, the soil and the rainfall far better than coffee ever had.

So the neatness in front of you is the second crop on a forest clearance. The bushes stand in contoured rows because rows on the contour hold soil on a slope that has nothing else to hold it. The scattered trees were planted for shade, shelter and firewood. The drains and stone-faced cuttings are there because a hillside stripped of forest and planted with a shallow-rooted shrub will otherwise wash into the rivers.

Forest survives only where planting was impossible or where somebody stopped it: on the highest plateaus, in gorges too steep to work, in a few protected fragments. Those remnants are why the region still has its endemic birds and amphibians, and they are small. Hold both thoughts at once as you drive. This is one of the loveliest landscapes anywhere, and it is also the visible record of an ecological event.

The people the estates were built around

Clearing and planting a mountain range takes an enormous amount of labour, and the planters could not raise it locally. Villagers in the Kandyan hills had their own land and no reason to take badly paid, dangerous work on a clearing. Labour was recruited in southern India instead, through intermediaries who brought over whole families, in numbers that changed the population of the central highlands permanently.

The journey was brutal. People landed on the north-west coast and walked inland and upward for days through the dry zone, and a great many did not survive the walk or the first months on the estates. Those who did were housed in terraces of single-room quarters, known then and now as the lines. Their children were born on the estate, worked on it and were buried on it. Whole communities have now lived in the same valley for more generations than most families anywhere can trace, without ever having owned any part of it.

Their legal position afterwards is the part visitors almost never hear. When Ceylon became independent, citizenship legislation was drawn in a way that excluded most of this population, and a very large number of people born in the country, as their parents had been, were left stateless. Agreements between the Sri Lankan and Indian governments in the decades that followed returned some of them to an India they had never seen. For those who stayed, citizenship was restored only in stages, and the last of it was not resolved until the early years of this century.

The community is usually called Malaiyaha Tamil, meaning the Tamils of the hill country, and it is distinct from the long-established Tamil population of the north and east. Estate life today means a village on a hillside: the terraces, a Hindu temple, a crèche, a shop, a school, a cricket pitch on any flat ground going. Housing, land tenure, schooling and pay have all been the subject of long and continuing dispute, and it would be dishonest to describe the scenery without saying so. When you pull over to photograph a hillside of tea, you are photographing somebody's workplace and, a few hundred metres up the slope, their home.

Learning to read an estate

An estate is a designed object, and every part of it is legible once you have the vocabulary.

The fields

Look for patchwork rather than uniformity. Fields are cut back hard on a cycle of several years to keep the bushes low and productive, so at any moment some blocks are a flat green surface in full flush, some are brown and stubby a few weeks after pruning, and some are halfway back. A field of what looks like dead sticks is not a failed estate, it is a pruned one. New planting shows as small separate bushes in bare soil, and it will be years before it earns anything.

The buildings

The factory is the tallest thing on any estate: a long multi-storey block, usually white or pale green, with rank after rank of louvred shutters down its flanks to move air through the withering floors, and the estate name in large letters on the wall. Below it will be a shed where plucked leaf is brought in and weighed. Somewhere on the best aspect, with the only garden, sits the superintendent's bungalow, which is where the old hierarchy is most visible; a good number now take paying guests.

The roads and the water

Estate roads are cut on gradients a loaded lorry can manage, which is why they wind so extravagantly, and they are frequently unsurfaced or surfaced only in two concrete strips up the steepest pitches. Small reservoirs and channels feed the factory, which needs a great deal of water.

Plucking, and watching people work

Plucking is the part of the industry everybody photographs and almost nobody understands. The standard is two leaves and a bud, taken from the tip of each shoot, where the flavour compounds concentrate. Take more and the tea coarsens. Doing it correctly, at speed, all day, on a slope, to a target weight, is a skill that takes years to acquire, and it is done overwhelmingly by women.

A field is worked on a round of roughly a week, so the same block is picked again as soon as the new flush is ready. The leaf goes into a sack or net carried on the back and held by a band across the forehead, and is weighed at the shed at the end of the round. The work is outdoors in whatever the mountains are doing that day, which for much of the year is drizzle and cloud, and the fields are steep, wet and full of leeches.

Then the etiquette, which matters more here than at any monument.

• Ask before you photograph, and accept a no. A person at work is not a feature of the view. Most will agree, and the asking is what turns it from surveillance into an exchange.
• Do not direct anybody. Asking a plucker to move into better light or hold the basket higher turns a worker into an unpaid model on her own time and against her own target weight.
• Stay out of the rows. Walking into a field tramples bushes and interrupts a line of people working across a slope in sequence.
• Be careful with the plucking experiences. Several estates offer visitors half an hour with an apron and a basket. At best this is a properly arranged, properly paid piece of hospitality with a member of staff glad of the work. At worst it is dressing up as somebody poorer than you for a photograph. Ask what the arrangement is, and if the answer is vague, skip it.

What happens inside a tea factory

A working factory is the best hour available in the region, and the one most visitors waste. Know the sequence before you walk in, because the guide moves quickly and the machinery is loud.

Withering

Green leaf arrives in the late afternoon and is spread on long troughs on the upper floor, where fans pull air through it overnight. This removes much of the moisture and leaves the leaf limp enough to be rolled without shattering. Those floors, with the louvres open and leaf spread to the far end of the building, smell extraordinary.

Rolling

The withered leaf drops to the floor below and goes into rolling machines, heavy cast iron tables and cones that twist and press it, breaking the cell walls so that the enzymes and juices inside meet the air. This is the noisiest part of the building, and the machinery is often very old, kept alive by an estate engineer.

Oxidation

The rolled leaf is spread on tables in a cool humid room and left to oxidise. This is universally called fermentation in the trade, which is a misnomer, since no yeast or microbe is involved. Over a couple of hours the leaf turns from green to coppery red and the aroma changes completely. The moment at which it is stopped is the most important decision made in the building: a judgement made on the smell and look of the leaf, different on a wet day from a dry one.

Firing, sorting and the tasting bench

Oxidation is halted by heat. The leaf passes through a dryer, driving off the remaining moisture and turning it black and brittle; from this point it is tea and it will keep. The fired tea then crosses vibrating meshes of decreasing size, which separate it by particle size into the grades, and machines that pull out stalk and fibre. Somewhere in the building is a tasting room with a row of white porcelain pots, where the tea maker brews to a fixed standard, slurps, spits and marks the result. If your tour includes that room and somebody explains what they are looking for, you have a good one.

The rhythm of the day

Because leaf arrives in the afternoon and is processed through the following morning, a morning visit is a visit with things running. Come at four and you will see troughs being loaded and everything else standing still. Production also stops on some days, including poya days and periods when little leaf is coming in, so have somebody check the day before rather than driving up on spec.

Telling a real factory tour from a gift shop

Quality varies enormously, and the difference is not price or grandeur. Some of the best tours are at plain working factories with no facilities to speak of, and some of the emptiest are at polished visitor centres with a car park and a café. Good signs, in rough order of usefulness:

• The building is currently making tea, not preserved. If the machinery is cold and silent on a weekday morning in season, ask why.
• The tour goes through the floors in sequence, from withering down to grading, rather than along one corridor with windows into a room.
• Your guide works there. Somebody from the factory can tell you what happens on a wet day, how they decide when to stop oxidation, and what grade that machine is throwing out. A guide hired for the visitor route cannot.
• Photography is restricted. Counter-intuitive, but real factories often limit cameras on the production floor for ordinary industrial reasons.
• There is a charge for the tour. A factory that charges is generally selling you the tour. One that does not is generally selling you the shop.

The bad version is the mirror image: a visitor operation with no functioning factory attached, a quarter of an hour past idle equipment with a scripted commentary, a tasting of one cup of sweetened tea, and a long showroom where the pressure begins. A commission system operates here as it does elsewhere in the country, with drivers and guides paid a percentage for bringing people in, so an unprompted strong recommendation for one particular place is information about the commission rather than about the tea. Say where you want to go, or ask for a factory that is working that morning and leave the choice open.

One caution. A real factory is an industrial building, with steep stairs, open machinery, heat near the dryers and floors slick with tea dust. Wear closed shoes.

The grades, decoded

Almost every visitor is told at some point that they are being offered the best tea. The word is meaningless as used, and the fastest way to stop being sold to is to understand what the letters on a chest actually describe. Grades describe the size and appearance of the leaf particle, not quality. Sorting happens at the end of processing, by mesh, so a single batch yields several grades at once.

• Orange Pekoe (OP) and its variants are the long, twisted, whole-leaf grades. Orange has nothing to do with the fruit or the flavour, and pekoe is a corruption of a Chinese term for the down on a young leaf. It means large leaf, nothing more.
• Broken Orange Pekoe (BOP) is leaf broken during processing. Smaller particles have more surface area, so it brews faster, darker and stronger than OP. This is not a lesser tea; it is a different cup, and it is often the best thing a high-grown factory makes.
• Fannings (BOPF) and dust are the smallest grades. They infuse very fast and very strongly and are what goes into tea bags. Dust here is a size, not a sweeping-up.
• An F for flowery in front of a grade indicates the presence of tip, the unopened bud, showing as pale flecks in the dry leaf.
• Silver and golden tips are buds alone, processed separately, made in tiny quantities and priced accordingly. Worth trying once; not what anybody drinks daily.

So the useful question is never whether a tea is the best. It is which garden made it, at what elevation, in which season, and which grade you are being offered from that batch. A seller who can answer those four questions is worth buying from. One who responds by repeating that this one is the best is telling you what they think you can be sold.

High grown, mid grown, low grown

Elevation is the variable that does most of the work in Sri Lankan tea, and the one visitors have least often had explained. The trade divides the island's tea roughly into three bands: high grown above about twelve hundred metres, mid grown between roughly six hundred and twelve hundred, and low grown below that. Nuwara Eliya is emphatically in the first band, and so is everything you will drive through here.

Height slows the bush down. Cool nights, thin air and mist mean less growth and more concentrated flavour, so high-grown teas tend to be lighter in colour, brisk, aromatic and comparatively delicate. Low-grown teas, from the warm south-western hills, grow faster and give a much darker, heavier cup, and much of that production goes to markets in the Middle East and Central Asia where that is the style wanted. Neither is better.

The country is further divided into recognised growing regions, and the names appear on the better packets: Nuwara Eliya, Uda Pussellawa, Dimbula, Uva, Kandy, Sabaragamuwa and Ruhuna. The two most distinctive to a beginner are Uva, on the eastern slopes, which gets a dry seasonal wind that produces an unmistakable character in its best months, and Dimbula, west of the divide, whose quality season comes when the other monsoon is drying its slopes.

Nuwara Eliya's own tea surprises people. It is the palest and lightest of the lot, closer in the cup to a delicate Darjeeling than to the strong dark brew most visitors associate with the word Ceylon, and it is often drunk without milk. Expecting builder's tea, you will think it weak. On its own terms it is the most distinctive thing the district produces.

Buying tea without being sold to

The tea is worth taking home and the buying is easy to get wrong. A few principles, none of which require knowing anything about prices.

• Buy loose leaf. Bags are filled with the smallest grades for speed and consistency and are not where the interesting tea goes.
• Buy small quantities of several things rather than one decorative tin of one thing. Tea does not improve with keeping, and you have no idea yet what you like.
• Ask when it was made. Freshness matters more than any label. A factory shop selling the last few months of its own production beats a souvenir counter with no date on anything.
• Treat flavoured tea as a separate purchase. Vanilla, mango and cinnamon blends are made for the visitor market and are perfectly pleasant. They will tell you nothing about the region you have just driven through.

Buying from the factory you have just toured supports the place that gave you the hour. Do not assume it is cheaper than a good shop in town, and do not let a tasting turn into an obligation.

The town itself, honestly

With the region in proportion, the town becomes enjoyable rather than disappointing, because you stop asking it to be something it is not. Half a day covers it comfortably.

Gregory Lake

The water at the southern edge of town is artificial, made in the colonial period by damming the stream that runs down the valley and named after the governor of the day. It is the town's public space and is used as one: a made path along much of the shore, pedal boats, horses, food stalls and, at weekends, a substantial crowd of Sri Lankan families. Do not expect solitude. Come on a weekday afternoon and walk the far side, where the crowds thin and the mountains reflect.

The post office

The red brick post office with the clock tower is the most photographed building in town and worth the two minutes. It is still a working post office, so go inside and post something.

The racecourse and the golf course

The flat floor of the valley holds a turf racecourse dating from the colonial period and still raced on, though for most of the year it is simply a large green space in the middle of town. Beside it is the golf club, eighteen holes among mature trees and one of the oldest courses in Asia, playable by visitors on arrangement and the most authentic surviving piece of the hill station. If golf means nothing to you, the walk round the outside still shows what the planters built.

Victoria Park and the market

The park in the centre is small, ticketed and much better than that sounds: a proper Victorian layout of lawns and old trees, with a stream running through it and flower beds of temperate species that startle anybody who has spent a week in the lowlands. It is also one of the best-known birdwatching spots in the country for hill species. The vegetable market nearby is worth another hour, piled with leeks, carrots, cabbages, beetroot and strawberries that grow here and nowhere else on the island.

April, and the season

Once a year the town becomes something like the thing on the brochure. The racing season falls around the Sinhala and Tamil New Year holidays in April, and Colombo comes up the hill for it. There is racing, a hill climb for cars on the road above the town, a flower show, boot fairs, and an atmosphere across the valley that is festive, crowded and faintly Edwardian.

In favour: it is the only time the town is fully inhabited in the way it was designed to be, April weather is usually the most settled of the year, and it is enormous fun if you like a crowd.

Against, honestly: accommodation fills months ahead and what remains is priced for the season, the roads up are slow with holiday traffic, the lakeside and park are packed, and quiet estate walking is not what April offers. If you have come for the tea and the landscape rather than the social calendar, almost any other month gives you a better version of the same region.

Lover's Leap and the short walks

One real pleasure of basing yourself here is that you can spend a day without getting into a car, which is unusual in Sri Lanka.

Lover's Leap

A waterfall on the slopes above the town, reached by walking out past the estate on the eastern side and up a lane through the fields. It carries the usual legend of a couple who jumped rather than be separated. The fall is modest and, in a dry spell, thin. The walk is the point: an hour or so out of town, climbing steadily through working tea with the bowl of the valley opening behind you, ending at a stream in a wooded cleft. Go in the morning, before the cloud comes down, and wear something with grip, because the last stretch is wet rock.

Single Tree Hill

The hill on the western side of town, with a track up through tea and eucalyptus to a summit under a communications mast and a view over the whole valley. Steeper and shorter than Lover's Leap, and the better of the two for a view. Allow a couple of hours out and back, and do not start late.

Moon Plains and the estate roads

Moon Plains is open high grassland a short distance from town with a long view towards the southern escarpment. It is ticketed, and access is by a rough track normally done in a hired jeep rather than a car. Failing that, the simplest good walk in the district is to pick any estate road out of town and follow it. No ticket, no gate, nothing to organise, and an hour on an estate road early in the morning, with the cloud lifting off the fields and people going to work, is what most visitors remember longest. Stay on the road rather than wandering into fields, and greet people, because you are the visitor in their lane.

The cold, and the damp

Sri Lanka does not feel like a country that needs a coat, so people do not bring one, and a great many visitors spend their evenings here quietly miserable in the only clothes they own.

Daytime is mild and frequently beautiful, at a temperature most northern visitors would call a decent spring afternoon. The trouble starts at dusk. The sun sets early in the tropics, the temperature falls quickly once it has gone, and by the middle of the night it is in single figures. Add the wind off the high ground and the near-permanent damp and the effect on somebody who has spent the previous week on a beach is considerable. Shops along the main road sell fleeces and woollen hats to underdressed visitors all year round.

The damp is what people are least ready for. Cloud sits in the valley for long stretches, particularly from mid-afternoon and particularly between May and September when the south-west monsoon drives straight at these slopes. It is not always raining, but it is very often wet, and things do not dry: washing hung overnight is still wet in the morning, and boots left outside stay soaked.

• One properly warm layer and something windproof over it. Not a beach cardigan.
• Shoes that cope with wet ground, and ideally a second pair, because the first will not dry overnight.
• Check what heating your accommodation has. Very few buildings here have any, and provision ranges from an open fire and a stone bottle in the bed down to nothing whatsoever. Hot water can be temperamental.
• Check that the car has heating that works if you will be out after dark. Almost nowhere else on the island is that worth asking.

None of this is a reason to stay away. The cold is why the town exists and why the tea tastes as it does, and a fire and a pot of local tea after a wet afternoon on an estate road is one of the better things the island offers. It only becomes a problem when it is a surprise.

Who owns the tea now

The plantations passed out of British ownership after independence and were subsequently taken into state hands; in the 1990s the running of them was leased out to private regional plantation companies, which is broadly the arrangement now. Alongside that, an increasing share of the country's tea no longer comes from large estates at all but from smallholders farming a few acres and selling green leaf to bought-leaf factories, mostly in the lower-lying south-west rather than up here.

The high-grown estates therefore sit in a difficult position. Their bushes are old, replanting is slow and expensive, the ground is too steep to mechanise the way flatter tea country elsewhere has been, and they compete against origins with lower costs. Fewer young people raised on the estates want to spend their working lives plucking, and many leave for the towns or for work overseas. Some estates have responded by opening bungalows to guests or turning part of the operation towards visitors. The landscape you are photographing is not a fixed backdrop; it exists because a difficult business keeps going.

Day trips from Nuwara Eliya

The town is the natural base for the highest part of the island, and most of what people come to the hill country to do is within a morning of it.

• Horton Plains and World's End, four to five hours for the nine-kilometre loop, is the outstanding excursion and has its own guide among the destination pages, so it is not repeated here. The one thing to carry away is that you need to be through the gate at six, because once the cloud rises later in the morning the famous viewpoint shows you nothing whatever. Nowhere but this town is close enough to make it a day trip.
• Adam's Peak, an overnight climb timed to reach the summit at sunrise, with a season running from December to May. The usual departure is from Dalhousie at about two in the morning, and the pick-up wants arranging for late morning, since nobody comes down quickly.
• Lipton's Seat, a morning, and go at dawn. The lookout where Thomas Lipton surveyed his estates, reached through tea fields above Haputale, with a view that runs to the south coast on a clear morning. The cloud has usually shut it by nine. Leave Haputale before six, or the drive up buys you a white wall.
• Hakgala Botanical Gardens, on the Badulla road below town, a terraced hillside garden of roses, ferns and temperate trees, with a Hindu temple associated with the Ramayana just below. Half a morning, and it pairs well with a factory visit on the same road.

Accessibility, plainly

• The town centre is difficult on foot. Pavements are narrow, broken, high-kerbed and often blocked by parked vehicles or stalls.
• Victoria Park and the made path at Gregory Lake are the good news. Both are largely flat with surfaced paths for much of their length, and between them they make a genuinely enjoyable half day without a climb.
• Factory tours are not accessible. Processing runs down through a multi-storey building on steep industrial stairs, with no lifts, narrow gangways and slippery floors. Some factories can show a visitor the grading floor and the tasting room at ground level if asked in advance, which is a partial answer rather than a full one.
• Estates cannot be walked by everybody. The paths between fields are steep, wet and uneven. What works instead is a slow drive along an estate road with stops at the pull-ins, which gives most of the landscape and none of the climb.
• The cold is a medical consideration for some people, not merely a comfort one. Be realistic about a pre-dawn start on a cold plateau if breathing or circulation is an issue.

Raise any of this at the point of booking, not at the bottom of a factory staircase. A driver who knows the district can usually rearrange a day around a difficulty told about in advance.

Getting to Nuwara Eliya

Briefly, because the route pages handle this properly. The most useful thing to know is that the distance lies about the journey. Colombo is a hundred and sixty-five kilometres away, which sounds like three hours and is five. Everything above the point where the tea starts is a slow climb on hairpins, and no vehicle and no driver can make it otherwise.

• Bandaranaike International Airport to Nuwara Eliya — 165 km, about 300 minutes.
• Colombo to Nuwara Eliya — 165 km, about 300 minutes.
• Kandy to Nuwara Eliya — 75 km, about 150 minutes.
• Ella to Nuwara Eliya — 55 km, about 105 minutes.

Two things belong here rather than on those pages, because they change the visit rather than the drive. Arriving in daylight matters if you are staying out on an estate, since the access roads are narrow, unlit and hard to find in mist. And a day with a driver is much the most efficient way to do the region, since a factory, an estate road and a viewpoint are each a short distance apart and each a slow drive. When you book a car, say which of those you want and let the driver order the day around whatever is working that morning.

A sensible plan

1. Give the region two nights if you can, and put one of them out on an estate rather than in the town. Waking above the cloud and walking into the fields before breakfast is what the place is actually for.
2. Arrive in daylight, because finding an estate bungalow up an unlit track in mist is a poor start to a stay.
3. Do the factory first thing, on a day when somebody has checked that it is running, and pick it for the working floors rather than the shop. Wear closed shoes.
4. Follow it with an estate road on foot, an hour out and an hour back, once the cloud has lifted and people are working.
5. Take the town in the afternoon, when the light has gone flat anyway: the market, the post office, Victoria Park and the quieter end of the lakeside path.
6. Keep one whole morning for Horton Plains if you have the second night, leaving before dawn, and treat that as the day rather than adding anything to it.
7. Buy the tea where you learned about it, in small amounts of several grades, and ask the four questions: which garden, what elevation, which season, which grade.
8. Pack for the evening, not the country. A warm layer, a windproof, and shoes you do not mind soaking.

Nuwara Eliya rewards a visitor who arrives with the emphasis in the right place. Treat it as a colonial curiosity and you get a mock-Tudor frontage, a cold hotel room and a lap of a lake. Treat the town as the small, odd, likeable thing it is, give your days to the hills around it and to how they came to look that way, and it becomes one of the very few places on the island where the landscape and its history are one subject.