The countryside in the hills here in Sri Lanka is beautiful. Nuwara Eliya is surrounded by farms, tea plantations and cool, fresh air! You can't really have a bad view out of your hotel room here.
The town itself has tons of colonial leftovers. We haven't seen this much colonial construction since the Cameron Highlands, another British hill station. Those Brits really didn't like hanging out in the hot lowlands.
We hiked down the steep road of our hotel to the main roundabout indicating the start of the tiny downtown area. We saw a huge park that had a smaller kids area with a ton of local families - check the calendar, oh right, it was Sunday (we'd lost track of the days of the week many weeks ago!).
We found a large, shady area to throw the disc. That was fun!
We strolled around the park, eventually stopping for a drink, watching a bunch of uniformed kids and their mothers playing little racing games. We had a "just like home" moment - we talked a lot about school and friends. It was just like a typical last weekend before school back home, though school is luckily still a distant future event at this point. The park was very chill which was perfect.
We went in to the kids section of the park - the kids were excited to try out some of the equipment - I think they miss that kind of free range activity. It reminded me of the park in Tokyo where they played with a little kid's zip line for hours. Sadly, we couldn't join the hoards, as the kids didn't meet the age (and even more so, the appearance of meeting the age) requirements for utilizing the rusted equipment.
We wandered and wandered. Shockingly, the post office was open, so we mailed some postcards to Abby's friends. For Robin, we just bought stamps that will be pasted on top of the Thailand stamps that are stuck on her yet to be written postcards.
We decided to go back to the Grand for lunch - this time the Thai one. There just aren't that many restaurants here, but I suspect that will change over the next few years. There is a ton of construction everywhere you go in Sri Lanka. After the war with the Tamils was settled in the mid 2000's, tourism started from near ground zero. Now? It's game on.
On the way to lunch, we stopped by a colourful fruit market to get some snacks for the train later.
We'd booked first class tickets for the train ride from Nuwara Eliya to Ella because we'd heard the views from the train were not to be missed. By car, it's probably an hour away, but the train ride takes a circuitous route at close to two and a half hours. We arrived at the little station twenty minutes from town about an hour early at 3pm.
The whole station was a time capsule from the early 1900's.
We camped out on the platform, waiting for the train. And waited. And waited. By 5:00pm, our now one hour late train was nowhere to be seen. The waiting was not a big deal, but Beth and I were starting to think about missing the views from the train when the sun set.... Which was pretty much the whole point of being here. I can't recall, but I think that was a fake smile from Beth :-).
I went to the station masters office, and immediately suspected what could be the problem: they had a frickin' telegraph machine and one of those telephone things only our parents would remember using (:-P). The station master even had a paper and pen log book. Wow.
It wasn't until 6:00pm before we got on the train, which was a disappointment. We only got about thirty minutes of viewable light from the train before pitch black night set in. The countryside was beautiful - much of what we saw on the train to Kandy, the drive to Nuwara Eliya and the drive to Horton Plains national park. It just reaffirmed how much beauty this little island country has to offer.
But it still sucked that we missed most of the view. Oh well.
The kids, on the other hand, seemed to be having a great time. They had their music plugged in and were watching the kids movies that were projected on mute throughout the "first class" cabin. They also found keeping track of two huge cockroaches that were scurrying around the front of the cabin quite amusing. These city kids have come a long way.
We arrived at Ella train station at around 8:30. True to his word, Manju, the owner of our next hotel stay, was standing there with a sign with our names on it. He seemed like a great guy and we chatted a little while walking, with our big packs on our back and day packs on our front, to the little parking lot. We stopped at a Tuk Tuk. Er... A Tuk Tuk? "No problem sir!" And he took all four packs and stuffed them in some magical, tardis-like compartment behind the back seat. We squeezed in and we were off. We were all chuckling - it seemed a bit ridiculous. We drove and drove, and I thought to myself "I could have sworn I picked a place with a good location..... Hmmm,". We passed the little backpacker area on the main road, then climbed a narrow little road for a while. Manju would chip in with an occasional funny comment about the ride that kept us at ease. He made a turn and we were hurtling down a confusing network of steep, narrow roads. I couldn't believe that in such a small town we'd been in the Tuk Tuk for about 7 or 8 minutes.
Eventually, we got to the guest house. He welcomed us to our room, took me out to the balcony and pointed out that if we took the path to town, it was only a five minute walk. Weird, but cool. We couldn't see anything, but got the feeling the view from the balcony would be pretty cool. After we got settled (by this point in the trip, we are "settled" in minutes....the same time it takes us to pack up and go...we are true transients!), we walked down to the restaurant area where Manju's father served a huge spread of Sri Lankan food cooked up by Manju's smiling mother.
I think we're going to like Ella.
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