Beth and I were up early to enjoy the changing view from our balcony. Beautiful.
We had a huge, typically eclectic Hotel breakfast spread, which would require refuelling sooner than later. It's funny, the Western breakfasts here, particularly for my egg hating family, are quite bad. The Sri Lankan breakfasts are great, but typically when we get to a hotel late, there's not enough lead time to get a Sri Lankan breakfast for the next morning - I guess they just don't have many tourists requesting local food for breakfast. Kind of weird. The Western breakfasts usually come with twenty or so lightly (or not at all) toasted pieces of white bread (meh), one or two spreads (jams, marmalade, butter), pineapple (great), small bananas (usually bad), tea (great) and runny omelettes (how do you do an ASCII pukeface emoji?). Abby in particular doesn't cope well with a light breakfast, so second breakfast is a priority for her.
I snapped this pic of Abby as we were coming out of the room - she's so funny about making sure she doesn't step on the ground. You'll notice someone's shoe under her left foot protecting her from the front porch. It reminded me of when she was four and I'd have to carry her down the beach in Barbados to the smooth section of sand. Lol.
Finding second breakfast for the girls was a grumpy, albeit short affair. Mark my words, in 5 years, Ella will be THE tourist Center of Sri Lanka - the Hoi An or Chang Mai of the country. There is a ton of construction, and we haven't seen such a concentration of restaurants and guest houses anywhere else. It just has that feeling of a place on the brink of "happening". The girls stopped at one of the many roti huts that had glassed in little cooking areas and watched as the cook prepared their second breakfast chicken fried rice.
There are many hikes in and around Ella. All of them seem to be very accessible from the little town, and most sounded easy to navigate. The one that had caveats in terms of navigation was the four hour return hike up Ella Rock - the huge promontory that we faced from our balcony in the morning. We'd read various levels of "you may get lost" to "it's not well marked" comments online and in Lonely Planet, but it seemed straight forward enough. You could hire a guide for 1500LKR for the hike, but I figured there would be people to ask along the way if we got lost, and sometimes getting a little lost could be ok.
We made like locals and walked along the train tracks. The tracks seems to be a very common way for people to get around in Sri Lanka. You see people quite often coming and going along the rails. There is no real imminent danger as the trains are quite loud, infrequent and slow moving, though not everyone in the group was totally at ease :-). The girls were at ease, munching on their gigantic portions of fried rice as we trundled along.
The views from the tracks were spectacular as we curved along the midpoint of the valley, going in a giant, 2km arc between the town and the tip of Ella Rock.
We saw a few tourist couples coming or going, and a bunch of locals - some moving bundles of small logs or construction material on their heads. We ended up missing the first turnoff (it's not really labelled), but a local pointed us in the right direction.
As we got off the tracks, there were a bunch of small paths that made us question where we were going. I figured there were many ways to get up, but when a local beckoned us to go one way with him, I figured we could use a volunteer (ie impromptu guide that we would end up tipping) to save time. The guide was a local farmer, and he pointed out a couple of things as he led us up the mountain for the next twenty minutes or so. He took a wide berth around some huge termite mounds, and we saw why on one - there were little snakes and lizards that had taken up residence in the holes of the mounds.
We got to a plateau area where a path that led steeply uphill to the summit looked pretty obvious, so I bid adieu to the "volunteer" by giving him 500LKR for his help. He insisted on 1000 but I countered with 500. That was settled. He did take one of the rarely seen four person family shots of the Tyndall family....
Getting to the top was a pretty good challenge. It was one of those steep climbs that didn't have too many obstacles, so it really worked your cardio. Our water was quickly disappearing. It was probably one of the harder cardio climbs we'd done, and the troops were in varying degrees of zen - from not at all to barely.
When we got to the top, there were ten other tourists recovering and enjoying the view. It was a spectacular site from the point of the summit.
After spending twenty minutes or so enjoying the post climb chillax, we headed back down the mountain. There was a lot more happy chatter on the way home I'll tell you! At one point, we were going down a side hill sandy and rocky section of the climb, when I slipped and my knee jammed on a rock. I yelled out (ok, I swore!) and the girls ran over to check on me. There was a bunch of blood, but it was mostly like deep road rash (oddly enough it made me miss cycling... I know, weird). As soon as the girls found out I wasn't going to bleed out, they immediately came up with the brainfartstorm that I should be the first patient in the Bickerson's Hospital.... Oh man, I was thinking bleeding out may have been the better option!
So that was all they could talk about as we continued down the hill and into the tea plantation area lower down. We found our way back to the railway tracks and ambled down towards Ella. We passed a little juice and food place at the side of the track (I told you, the railway is almost like a road - where else would you see restaurants next to a railway, with no road access!) where a British couple that we recognized from Polonnurawa hailed us, so we joined them for a fresh fruit juice.
We continued on, finding another little bamboo restaurant built on stilts on the valley side of the rail. It was full of noisy tourists, so we saw that as a good sign and walked in and grabbed a table. For some reason, there was, I'm guessing, 1950's Christian classical music being played (they must have read the Russian written manual from the Cold War called "What American's Want") - we looked at each other and burst out laughing. After ordering and waiting a good 45 minutes, we started to see the lone server dude really struggling - he was giving the wrong dish to the right table and visa versa. Some of the patrons were kind of laughing it off, though a few people left in a huff. We were in a more light hearted state and found it all pretty amusing - something I probably wouldn't have predicted from our group four months ago. To our shock, when our food did come, it was all correct and really delicious.
We got to town and wondered around a bit. It was getting late, and we headed back to find the little local trail shortcut that led to the hotel, trying to avoid the danger that seemed to be everywhere :-)
I did my stint in the Bickerson's Hospital - it was.... interesting, though I'm not sure standard procedure of treating a scrape is to continually poke and prod the area... Ouch!
We feel like we've been eating at home for most meals in Sri Lanka. Not only is the food here really different than Indian food, the whole process of eating as a tourist here is different - and we're loving it. Our dinner tonight for example: the owner of the hotel asked us if we wanted dinner, and we said sure. What time? 7:30. Done. So after chilling out in the late afternoon, we went down to the open air restaurant for our dinner. As was their custom, we were served a bunch of dishes and as is our new Sri Lankan custom, we devoured them.
Ella is a place we would have spent a few more days at for sure. This little country is really impressive, and the hill stations and mountain towns are some of the highlights, not to mention the nice home cooked meals.
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