Ella —> Nuwara Eliya

After an amazing nights sleep in the tent at Tomorrowland we got up at 05:45 to go up to the little viewpoint for a 360° view of sunrise. It was quite a nice sunrise, but a bit cloudy so we headed back down to get another hour or so of sleep. We both woke up just before 8 absolutely boiling as the sun was beating down on our tent...time to get up. We brushed teeth with an amazing view over the valleys above Ella. We hopped in the Tuktuk to go the ‘secret waterfalls’. Again, it wasn’t such a secret spot unfortunately with some locals obviously not particularly caring and leaving lots of litter about the place. Still, the falls were quite nice and I climbed up to have a good view of them, immediately stubbing my toe on a rock!! After I got out, I needed a wee and exclaimed “It’s a really pretty waterfall, I might piss in it” to the amusement of Tom.

We headed back to Tomorrowland to pack up our stuff after a very chilled 24 hours. We were heading to Nuwara Eliya, the pronunciation still a mystery as all locals said it differently. We popped back down through Ella and out onto the open road, quite sad to leave the little backpacker town behind. It was a couple of hours on windy roads to get to our next stop. We climbed up and up and the temperature dropped quite drastically...we’re talking 20°C instead of 30°C - what a disaster!! We drove round lake Gregory to get to the town of Nuwara Eliya. We eventually found our guesthouse, a colonial looking building with a nice lawn overlooking the hills and town. We headed out for a walk starting with a national park which Tom said was full of birds, however we heard no bird calls as we assumed this was a morning job. Onwards to Victoria Park, we got to the entrance and shock horror you had to pay 300 rupees to go in...skip that, especially as none of the locals have to pay. We went to the local market in the centre of town and found a little food court where they sold Dhal Vada, a kind of deep fried Dhal snack - amazing! We then went to the famous post office - one of the oldest in Sri Lanka. It was quite cool and had a old fashioned English post box outside, a little slice of home. We chilled out on the lawn for a bit, then went to the highly recommended Sri Ambaals restaurant where it was an all you could eat meal for £0.65. It was a strange ordering system, we just pointed and this naan bread thing arrived on a plate with some sort of filling. The guy then brought over big metal buckets of curry and filled our plates. He left the buckets for us to just keep going!! Without a single piece of cutlery in sight, we dug in with our hands...messy, very messy - Uncle Bob would have needed a few changes of clothing 😀

We were stuffed, so headed back to the guesthouse to grab a hot shower (a rarity in Sri Lanka) and sit out on the lawn with our books, I promptly fell asleep on the swing chair. Tom wanted to go down to the lake as we may get a sign of the party buses we’d heard about. Sure enough they were there, the locals having a dance next to this bus with enormous speakers. We went to this little carnival and watched the locals play an impossible to win dice game, regardless they were all chucking loads of money into the ring. This woman then randomly approached Tom and and threw her baby into his arms and started videoing us...all a bit strange as she didn’t seem to want the baby back. Anyway, we hopped back in the Tuktuk and went back to the guesthouse and spent a couple of hours chatting to Dominic, an Aussie, and Jasmina, a German girl - we all shared a few laughs and a few cups of tea before heading to bed.Read more