Nuwara Eliya

Nuwara Eliya is high up in the Sri Lankan mountains and was the coldest place we‘ve been to so far during our travels - even Gilles had to put on his sweatshirt for the very first time! (Mind you, it was like 10 degrees celsius, but after months in an average temperature of 27 degrees it felt like Swiss winter). Apart from that, it is not more than a little city with a big horse race patch (yes you read correctly), sporting a small and half-empty lake, and being surrounded by endless fields of tea plantages. All in all, it very much reminded us of Dalat in Vietnam, which had a similar altitude and topology, similar temperatures and was also mainly visited by local tourists looking for relieve of the otherwise high temperatures of the country. Another common thing is that both villages have been built by the colonial forces (hence the horse race patch in the middle of Nuwara Eliya), and the remaining and/or newly built colonial-style buildings add a lot to the charme! As you may have guessed from the horse race patch, it was the British for Nuwara Eliya 😉 and it is still called ‚little England‘ these days.
While the colonial-style buildings are very pretty, the contrast to the Sri Lankan lifestyle and -architecture is somewhat weird to see. Further, because it is so famous among the locals (more than among the western tourists), a lot of the infrastructure is solely built for getting money from tourists - jetskies and boatrides on the half empty lake, a ‘park’ full of Disney statues, many ‘guides’ trying to convince you to do horse-riding around the lake and big, highly expensive (but indeed very pretty) resorts. As you may have guessed for now, we did not like it one bit. So we stayed one night at a very cute homestay with awesome view across the lake, had dinner at a super-western-tourist restaurant for way too much money (but they played very nice techno music, so somewhat excused) and got a massive and supertasty Sri Lankan breakfast the next morning. In hindsight, the stop was not really worth the money, but id you never try you never know 🤷🏻‍♀️ now we’re facing another one of the most awesome trainrides we’ve ever experienced, on to Ohiya, where the Horton National Park awaits us ✨Read more