We had a long day in the car today, but in contrast to the drive with Raja, it was a relatively good experience. We were leaving Northern Sri Lanka to head for the south central hill station town of Nuwara Eliya. First up, Nimal's wife prepared a great local breakfast.... Yum.
We said goodbye to our awesome hosts - the manager, Vipul, Nimal's brother and Nimal and his wife (the observation of no smile in photos but smiling at all other times continues....):
We could kind of understand Nimal explaining to the nice little driver in sinnalese that he should be stopping when we wanted and to try and show us interesting things. He had explained earlier that so many of the people in the tourism industry still didn't understand what was important to tourists - Nimal definitely got it. When Beth settled up our bill with him, we were shocked how little he charged us for food, and charging nothing for all the short Tuk Tuk drives. We gave Vipul a nice tip and we were off.
After about an hour, we were on the all too familiar road to Kandy called the A9. For lunch, we got the driver to bring us to the Garden Cafe where we feasted. We've been here one week, had breakfast included in every hotel stay and have eaten at the Garden Cafe 6 times!
The road south was uneventful for an hour or so after Kandy, but then it started to weave up the mountains. I'm glad we were in comfy seats in an air conditioned van - otherwise it would have been puke-inducing. We stopped at one point for a nice view of the valley below.
Another half hour of weaving later and we stopped in at a beautiful little tea plantation. Tea plantaatiins here, compared with the huge ones in Cameron Highlands, seem more like wineries than full-on production facilities.
We had tea, and debated the merits of waiting for the cake that was taking a long time. Eventually it did come, and it was stale chocolate dust, but Abby did her best at defending it.
Nuwara Eliya was another half hour or so of weaving through the mountains. When we got to the hotel, it was close to 5:00pm. This place is nice and cool and surrounded by fog/clouds. We quickly arranged a hiking excursion for the morning, had our host arrange train tickets for our next leg, then took him up on his offer to go pick up pizza for us.... I could get used to that!
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