Nuwara Eliya 2 Day Tour and World's End Hike from Colombo

Overview

Nuwara Eliya sits at nearly two thousand metres in the middle of Sri Lanka, surrounded by tea and built by homesick British planters to look like Surrey. Above it a high plateau ends abruptly in a cliff nearly nine hundred metres deep, and reaching that cliff at the right hour is the whole point of the trip.

What to expect

A drive up from the coast through the plantations, a night in the hill town, a very early start for the plateau, the circuit on foot, and the long descent back.

The view closes at half past nine

The fact that dictates everything. Warm air rises off the lowlands through the morning and condenses against the escarpment, so by mid-morning the drop is packed with cloud and there is nothing to see but white. You want to be at the edge by eight, which means leaving the town around half past five. Treat this as a leisurely morning and you get a wall of fog and a nine-kilometre walk for nothing.

What the drop actually is

The plateau simply stops. The escarpment falls close to nine hundred metres in one go, and on a genuinely clear morning you can see across the plain to the south coast, eighty kilometres away and thousands of metres below. A second, lesser viewpoint and a waterfall lie on the same circuit, which runs about nine and a half kilometres.

No plastic gets through the gate

A rule that catches almost everyone. The park operates a strict ban on polythene and bags are searched at the entrance. Plastic bottles, wrappers, packets and bags are removed, registered or refused. Decant your water into a reusable bottle before you arrive and leave the snack packaging in the vehicle, or you will be doing it at the checkpoint with a queue behind you.

Dress for frost

This is the coldest place in the country. The plateau sits above two thousand metres, the walk starts before sunrise, and in January and February there is often frost on the grass. Travellers arrive from thirty degrees on the coast wearing what they wore in Colombo and spend the first hour genuinely suffering. Bring a fleece, a windproof layer and something for your hands.

The tea is here because the coffee died

The fact that explains the entire landscape. These hills were coffee, not tea, and coffee made the colony rich. In the 1870s a leaf fungus arrived and destroyed the crop across the island within a decade, ruining planters wholesale. Tea was the desperate replacement, planted on estates already cleared for something else. Every terraced hillside you photograph on the drive is the consequence of a plant disease.

Who picks it

Worth knowing as you look at the estates. The workforce is descended from Tamil labourers brought from southern India by the British in the nineteenth century to work these plantations. Their descendants still live and work on the same estates, and they remain among the poorest communities in Sri Lanka; a 1948 act stripped many of citizenship, and the question was not fully resolved until 2003. The women you see picking are doing skilled, quota-driven work in cold rain for very little.

The dead trees

You will notice them on the plateau: whole stands of montane forest standing bare and grey among the living. The dieback has been advancing for decades and its cause is still argued over, with acid deposition, soil chemistry and a changing climate all put forward. Nobody has settled it, and it spreads.

What the booking does not cover

Park entry and permits are settled at the gate on the morning. Lunches, dinners and anything to drink beyond the water provided are also yours. Carry rupees in cash; there is nowhere to draw money at the park.