Ella

We left Tissa yesterday and took a local bus to Ella. The original plan was to take a taxi as Google Maps showed the bus as taking 4.5hrs (via the coast with a lot of back tracking), but our host told us there were 3 direct busses to Ella every morning so we decided to try and take that to save some money. Our host walked us to the bus stop (no signs and not shown as a bus stop on Google Maps, but just a lamp post where locals know the bus to stop) and we hopped on a very full bus to Ella. Thankfully, half the people got off half an hour later and we were able to put our bags down and sit down for the remaining 2hrs of the journey. After 2hrs of very fast and chaotic driving from the low country, we made it to the hills surrounding Ella in the high country. We were a bit sore from the safari, so we had an easy afternoon of shopping in town, followed by an Ayurveda massage.

Today, we hired a scooter to do a bit of exploring. After a bit of faffing and a hiccup with hiring a scooter (our host tried to give us a scooter with a non-functioning dashboard, we ended up hiring elsewhere), we made our way to Ella Organic Tea Garden, where we did a fascinating 2hr tour of the plantation and learnt how black, green and white tea are made. All tea is actually made from the same plant (or variety of the same tea plant), but are processed differently to create black, green and white tea. We enjoyed our morning learning about tea and it was one of the better tours we've done on this trip.

After the tour, we drove to a café that overlooked the famous Nine Arches Bridge. We waited around for an hour for the train to come through, but it was over an hour late and showed up as we were walking back to our scooter - typical!

We then ended our mini adventure with a massive side mission to get fuel (the only gas station in the area is 10km+ outside the town), lunch and to visit Ravanna Falls.Leia mais