Our friendly tuk-tuk driver from yesterday drove us to the Kandy bus station this morning, and we caught yet another public bus for the 3-hour ride way up to Nuwara Eliya, in the mountains of tea country. The bus ride was gorgeous, driving up hairpin mountain roads overlooking tea plantations and lakes, all with a cool tropical breeze blowing through the bus' windows.

While the rest of Sri Lanka is at sea level, tea country is over a mile up. Sri Lankan tea production, spurred by the British, originated here in Nuwara Eliya; the Brits took advantage of Nuwara Eliya's cooler temperatures and forested terrain to remake the village into "Little England." Red phone boxes sit next to Buddhist temples, and Tudor mansions nestle among tea plantations and palm trees. It's quite a bizarre juxtaposition.


Fun fact: Tea is a very popular beverage. Only water is drunk more often. In fact, more tea is drunk every day than coffee, soda, and alcohol combined. And much of that tea is grown right here.

So to properly stay in a "Little England," we splashed out for a Tudor-style British heritage hotel, sporting a fading colonial glory motif...including a mahogany bar, a snooker and billiards room, bidets, and TOPIARIES in the English garden (how very "The Shining"). It's a hoot. We were even upgraded to a suite, which includes a veddy British sitting room with wicker furniture and a clawfoot bathtub.

After checking into our hotel, we strolled the town. Apparently the weather is much nicer than a normal March day- instead of drizzly and chilly, it was in the high 70s and sunny. It was a huge relief from the baking heat of our previous towns. However, "seeing Nuwara Eliya" takes about 45 minutes. There are two English garden-style public parks (both which, despite the term "public park," charge admission), and a street market selling hugely discounted factory-second outerwear. North Face and Columbia outerwear have their factories here in Sri Lanka, and a $200 tunic will cost you maybe $20 here. If we were outdoorsy types, or if we hadn't just spent the last few months purging our clothes and furnishings to move to the UK, we might have been interested.


So unless you like to hike chilly mountains in cold weather (which we absolutely do not), or play golf (which we also do not), there's not much to do in Nuwara Eliya. So why did we stop here? Two reasons: 1) To get to our next destination, Ella, would have required a 7 hours train ride today, so we decided to break it up; and 2) Nuwara Eliya features The Grand Hotel, a gorgeous old colonial hotel in the center of the village. And every day at 3pm, the Grand Hotel serves a proper British high tea on its sprawling front lawn- for just 800 rupees, or about $6 USD per person. Given that our new London home charges about $75 USD for high tea, AND The Grand Hotel's tea is an all-you-can-eat buffet of pastry deliciousness, it becomes quite obvious as to why this was a necessary stop on our itinerary.


We were seated at a picnic table with a wonderful Belgian couple- and bizarrely, one of the men was a bald, cat-loving, well-traveled chef, so we had much in common with our tablemates. The four of us talked until sunset, enjoying the unseasonably warm weather and the lovely surroundings. It turns out the couple own a restaurant in Ninove, outside Brussels, called Carte Blanche- and we are heading to Belgium in the fall, so a visit to this Belgian Master Chef's kitchen is in our future.


Later in the evening, we had whiskeys in our hotel's mahogany bar to finish off a wonderful, though atypical, Sri Lankan day.