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HE SAID... Today we were travelling south-east from Kandy to
Bandarawela.
Despite the previous evening’s drinks, we woke early (6:30am) and headed up to breakfast in the hotel’s open air dining area. I decided against a Sri Lankan breakfast – not because I didn’t feel well, but we had a five and a half hour train trip ahead, and I was hoping not to patronise the train’s toilet too frequently. I opted for cornflakes, guava juice, tea, toast and boiled eggs.
We checked out of the charming Senani Hotel mid-morning, clambered into the minibus and headed down into Kandy’s railway station. We picked up some vegetarian pan rolls (filled and rolled-up crepes that are crumbed and fried) and vegetable roti triangles (filled roti folded into a triangle and sealed) to snack on, and I also grabbed some ginger beer for the trip. We waited on the station’s platform in the morning heat until our train rolled in just after 11am. There was a bit of biff getting into our carriage, because a few brazen tourists were trying their luck at getting better seats – we were in second class, and they were meant to be in third class. Once
the biff calmed and the grumpy tourists left, we took our seats and settled in for the journey.
We rolled out of Kandy at 11:30am, lurching from side to side as we peered out the open window at the lush green hills that surround this bustling city. Kandy had become very familiar, and I’m looking forward to coming back in a few weeks.
As the train lurched, screeched and clattered through the hills, we passed tea plantations, crossed rivers and plunged in and out of dark tunnels. I absolutely love train travel, and the vista from our window on this journey was breathtaking. Our seats were facing the back of the train, so we were travelling backwards, but this didn’t dent our enjoyment.
We picked us some spicy nuts from one of the vendors wandering the carriages with his wares, and they were fantastic. After two hours clattering along the tracks we passed through Hatton, and the landscape began to look familiar, as we’d driven through this area with Ren’s uncle and cousin only a week before. A fellow traveller (Damien) had some local white rum in his pack, so we topped up our ginger beer and
enjoyed a
Light ‘n Stormy as we marvelled at the tea estates surrounding us on both sides of the tracks. As we climbed higher into Sri Lanka’s Hill Country, we became shrouded in mist.
I saw young children waving to our train from decrepit shanties built metres from the rail tracks. I saw a teenager sitting in the open doorway of a crumbling tea estate house, and I couldn’t help but imagine him bored and lonely. I saw a kid playing soccer on a dusty field set upon by two of his peers, one punching and the other kicking. The scenery of this train trip may have been beautiful, but the abject poverty was anything but.
As we neared Bandarawela, a vendor wandered through the carriages selling piping hot sugary tea in small plastic cups. We each had a cup of this frothy tea, and it was fantastic. If only he’d walked through our carriage earlier in the trip! We arrived in Bandarawela in the late afternoon, jumped off the train, walked outside the station, clambered into our minibus and climbed into the hills above this bustling town, arriving at our hotel (US Resorts) around 5:30pm. This was
not a good place, and it was clearly obvious from the start.
After a tense argument with the hotel owner about the price of his beer, we headed back down into town in a three-wheeler (motorised tricycle with a passenger cabin, also called tri-shaws or tuk-tuks) to buy some drinks from the ubiquitous Cargills Food City supermarket. With a dedicated beer kitty, we picked up some Lion beer and soft drinks, climbed back into the three-wheeler and slowly wound our way back up into the hills to the hotel. Enjoying our drinks in warmth of the setting sun, we sat outside on an open balcony and waited patiently for our promised buffet dinner. The food was finally laid out at 8:30pm (after being promised for 7:30pm), and it was stone cold and ordinary. We served ourselves vegetable soup followed by rice with chicken curry,
dahl (lentil curry), green bean curry, eggplant curry, pappadums and chilli paste. We were then faced with a selection of humdrum desserts – red jelly, trifle jelly, melted ice cream and bland curd with treacle. Not happy Jan!
This was meant to be a Sri Lankan food trip, but the guys running this place
were cowboys. They said ‘Yes’ to everything but delivered nothing. After such an enjoyable train trip, this should have been an oasis in the heart of the Hill Country. However, the power continually went off, the building was only half finished and we were filmed (despite our objections) throughout the meal by two staff members on their smartphones. ‘Shambolic’ is the only adjective that comes close to describing the place – it was a real-life Faulty Towers.
The Lonely Planet Guide’s description of nearby Ella told a similar story: “In recent years the popularity of Ella has soared and seemingly every month yet another new guesthouse or hotel opens. Sadly, some of these newer hotels have been built in a hurry by people with little knowledge of the desires and requirements of the average foreign tourist in Ella, resulting in some large, multistorey, cheaply made blots of ugliness scarring the hills of the village.” (Lonely Planet – Sri Lanka, 13th Edition, 2015, p 179). It appears the same frightful fate has befallen Bandarawela.
Anyway, we were travelling to enjoy ourselves, so we settled on the hotel’s dining room, pushed all memory of the cold buffet fiasco to one
side and enjoyed our remaining drinks, eventually retiring a little after midnight.
We woke early (6am), caught up on our travel writing and headed out for a ‘peaceful’ morning walk. We were restricted in our options, as we could only walk on the narrow busy road leading down into town. The luxury cars parked on the roadside above our hotel were in stark contrast to the old buses and beaten up vans speeding past us downhill, carrying villagers to the stores and schools in bustling Bandarawela. We walked back to our ostensibly ‘affluent’ hotel and settled on the open air balcony for breakfast, and to our surprise the food had improved noticeably from the previous night’s buffet! We enjoyed
string hoppers (steamed vermicelli-like rice noodles),
kiri bath (coconut milk rice), chicken curry, fried eggs,
aloo kiri hodi (potato in coconut milk gravy),
seeni sambol (caramelised onion relish),
pol pani (crepes filled with sweetened coconut), toast and tea. A jug of fresh paw paw juice sat tantalisingly on the buffet table, but it smelt and tasted like vomit (to me), so I had to pass. There is something about paw paw that I always find hard to stomach.
After
our enjoyable buffet breakfast we jumped into the minibus and wound our way up through the steep hills of Haputale, where women were picking tea on extremely steep tiers. On the way we past a number of large poster boards with environmentally focused messages, and one appeared to have misinterpreted its intended message – a man hanging by the neck from a tree with a plastic bag over his head. To me, the poster seemed to imply that suicide in the area would sully the environment, so think twice before taking your life! I’m pretty sure this is not what the startling caricature was meant to convey, but it certainly seemed that way. The actual message (I discovered later) was that plastic is choking the environment, and therefore needs to be disposed of sensitively. While the message is critically important, I think the poster needs some serious redrafting…
We continued our journey up a steep narrow road with a precipitous drop on one side into the valley below, when suddenly – horror of horrors – we saw a huge overcrowded bus hurtling down the road towards us. There was barely enough room for a single car, let alone a
bus, and definitely no room to pass. Both vehicles stopped metres from each other, and a Mexican standoff was in play. The hulking bus was four times our size, so we clearly had to give in – our driver started reversing down the road, then turned into the gravel on the precipitous side…
My heart stopped as I momentarily glanced into the valley way, way below. I had a burning desire to disembark. There was still no room to pass, so we continued reversing down the narrow road before pulling into the smallest of gaps on the mountain side. The hulking bus only just managed to squeeze past us on the valley side, with its tyres slipping in the gravel. I imagined tiny stones, displaced by the tyres, cascading down the mountainside, and I was so grateful we weren’t following them.
We were heading to the Dambatenne Tea Factory, the largest of its kind in the country, and we were slowly making our way upwards along a very narrow road through tiny Tamil villages perched on the hill slopes. The abject poverty of the villages and their inhabitants was confronting – to say the least. We arrived at
the factory mid-morning and set off on a crowded, whirlwind tour of the facility with a bored and disinterested guide. It was one of the least informative tours I’ve experienced, but I couldn’t help thinking about the life the guide must lead. After walking the wooden floors and stairs of the factory for about 30 minutes, the tour abruptly ended, and we were a little disappointed that we couldn’t sample any tea or walk through the actual plantation.
With more than a hint of annoyance we climbed into our minibus, left the factory gates and retraced our path back along the narrow road we’d travelled less than an hour earlier. After about 15 minutes we stopped on the roadside, jumped out of the minibus and trekked down a rough narrow track into one of the tiny Tamil villages on the hillside. The views on the walk were stunning, and we were at all times surrounded by tea plantations stretching down into the valley. With tea picking offering such a difficult and adverse subsistence, we were very lucky (and privileged) to be joining a local tea picking family for a home-cooked lunch.
We arrived at a basic dwelling in
the village a little before midday, and we were warmly greeted by a Tamil woman who placed a
pottu (dot of red vermilion powder) on our foreheads. She welcomed us into her home, where she was preparing lunch for us. We sat around her small dining table and enjoyed a cup of hot black tea, then watched her make
masala vadais (lentil fritters) in her tiny kitchen, which we had as an entree to the meal. We then settled in for a fantastic meal of
idlis (steamed cakes made from fermented black lentils and rice),
thosai (thin lacy crepes made of lightly fermented black lentils and rice / called
dosa in India), coconut chutney (a thick mixture of ground coconut, tamarind and chilli), and
dahl. We finished the meal with a sago dessert called
payasam, which to my surprise was served with pappadums. I loved this dessert. I had three serves, and even scraped out the serving bowl when everyone else had finished. I discovered later that
payasam is an essential component of any Tamil celebration or festival.
As lunch drew to a close we bid farewell to our friendly host and made our way out of the tiny
Tamil village, giving way to dogs and chickens as we walked along the narrowest of tracks between houses. We climbed up a steep path to the road where our minibus was waiting, jumped in and headed back to the township of Bandarawela. We walked the main streets for about 30 minutes, but it wasn’t the most picturesque or friendly of towns, so we decided to return to our hotel in the hills, dropping into Cargills on the way to pick up some beer and arrack.
We settled on our hotel’s open air balcony and enjoyed a few drinks in the late afternoon sun before heading out to another local family’s house in Bandarawela for dinner, picking up some more beer and arrack on the way. Our hosts were far more affluent than the Tamil family we’d lunched with, but they were just as friendly and welcoming.
We helped cook
brinjal moju (fried eggplant pickle with green chillies and red onions) in the family kitchen, then we settled around the large family dining table as our hosts prepared an incredible meal. We feasted on rice with
dahl,
amberalla (wild mango) curry,
polos (young jackfruit) curry, chicken curry, potato curry,
brinjal moju and pappadums. We finished with a
kitul flour pudding, but I had to check this with Ren, as the only thing I’d written in my travel notes was ‘bark of the fish tail – dessert’. I think I can see where I was going (or what I had heard), because the fish tail palm is known as
kitul in Sinhalese, and the trunk from this tree yields a flour which is used in Sri Lankan cooking.
We finished our meal, bid farewell to our friendly hosts and headed back up to our hotel in the hills. We settled on our favourite open air balcony and enjoyed a few drinks into the late evening with our travel companions. The arrack flowed freely (maybe a little too freely, as I have little recollection of the end of the night). However, I do remember most of the evening’s discussions and songs, and it was fantastic.
SHE SAID... Very annoyingly we woke up at 4:30am, then again at 5:30am, and finally dragged ourselves out of bed at 7am. We were facing a long train journey from Kandy to
Banderawela, and a broken night’s sleep wasn’t ideal. It had
been a late night 'helping' Damien watch the Ireland-England rugby match, and I had mistakenly thought we’d sleep soundly.
I had my usual large hotel breakfast, starting with eggs on toast and ending with the Sri Lankan breakfast option, which was
string hoppers (steamed vermicelli-like rice noodles), chicken curry,
dahl (lentil curry) and
pol sambol (shredded coconut with onions, chilli and lime). I have fully embraced the big fusion hotel breakfast! After breakfast we packed and prepared for our long travel day.
Kandy is often used as a gateway to the so-called ‘up-country’ tea plantation area that we were heading into. We’d visited that area on a day trip a week before, and I was looking forward to spending more time there. We were dropped off at the Kandy train station by our minibus (Anil our driver and Hemantha our bus assistant were continuing on to Bandarawela with our luggage). We stocked up on cold drinks and also did a bit of snack shopping at the small train station shop – vegetable pan rolls (filled and rolled-up crepes that are crumbed and fried) and vegetable roti triangles (filled roti folded into a triangle and sealed).
The station
looked like it was in a time warp from the 1950s. It was charming, but a few much needed upgrades like more seating and better toilets would have been great. We waited with as many locals as tourists until the train chuffed in from Colombo ten minutes late at 11:20am. We had second class reserved seating, but still had to endure some pushing and shoving by a group of backpackers when we were boarding the train. We later discovered they had put their packs through the windows to block seats, which explained the attempt to rush to those seats before we got to them. Luckily we got there first and were able to offload their packs from our seats – to which they reacted quite angrily. They had third class tickets but were trying their luck in second class, so weren't too happy that we had wrecked their plans and swore as they stormed off. I’m sure that had they got to our seats first, we would have had a bigger battle getting them to leave. It never ceases to amaze me that when people get caught doing the wrong thing, rather than being apologetic or ashamed as any decent
person should be, they so easily resort to aggression instead.
The train left the station quite quickly, and we were happy that we were finally on our way. I had been very much looking forward to this train trip and I enjoyed it every bit as I expected I would. I loved seeing the gradual change in topography and landscape from built up urban mess, to outer suburbs with small gardens, to swathes of tall rubber plantations and acres of lime green rice paddies that bordered uncultivated land with wild jack, coconut and banana trees.
As we continued to wind our way upwards in the hill country we passed Nawalapitiya and Hatton, and the views from the train got even more interesting. The scenery changed to steep mountain passes and bridges across muddy rivers that framed intricately manicured tea bushes cascading down every hillside.
The train was comfortable and the even the toilets were surprisingly clean. We had no air-con in our carriage, but the open train windows kept things very cool, which was also great for photography. However, it made for a very noisy clickaty-clackety journey. There weren't as many vendors hopping on at the train
stations as I expected, and those that intermittently came on were selling either fruit (that was hard to eat on a moving train) or fried snacks (much easier to eat on a swaying train… see how I justified that?). We bought some fried peanuts with chilli and curry leaf which was served in a square packet fashioned out of what looked like a Tamil multiple-choice exam paper. It was really tasty, and we would definitely have bought a few more packets, but we didn’t see that vendor again. Finally, towards the end of our trip, the most sort after vendor – the
chai tea guy –appeared. That sweet frothy tea dispensed out of a flask into small cups was as comforting as it was delicious!
I fell asleep at some point, and when I woke up the valleys below the train line were blanketed in a thick mist. However, as we approached Bandarawela at 5pm, the mist cleared and a golden late afternoon sun was lighting up the hills. Even though it had been a long train trip, I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. We thought we’d have to wait for a while for our minibus to arrive,
but Anil must have floored it up those inclines, as they arrived at the station a few minutes after we did.
Our hotel was up in the hills and about 10 minutes out of town… and the closest thing to the Faulty Towers hotel we’ve ever experienced! The US Resorts Bandarawela is not one I could recommend to anyone. Where do I begin? For starters – being out of town in itself wasn’t an issue, but there weren’t any three-wheelers (motorised tricycle with a passenger cabin, also called tri-shaws or tuk-tuks) handy for quick trips into town, so it was quite isolating. The hotel was in an unfinished building above a house, and the rooms were very varied – from lovely rooms to what looked like internal store rooms with no windows. But the bigger issue for me was that the owner had an attitude problem – he was ill-mannered and seemed to find attending to issues (like the hot water not working) very tiresome. He was definitely in the wrong business. At best, the business was a guest house, and most definitely not a resort!
I felt sorry for the odd-ball team of service staff at the
hotel, as they clearly had no training and spoke no English, yet were expected to deal with us. They tried very hard, as did we, but the inability to communicate about really basic things (like needing cutlery) was a big issue… So, as much as I thought the staff were nice people, I’d have to rate the service as quite poor. We were also quite let down by our group leader Thila, proving further that he was ineffectual and indifferent – he simply disappeared and left us to our own devices. So far he’s in the running for the title of the worst Intrepid Travel group leader we’ve had.
As the hotel was going to charge an astronomical amount in-house for drinks, Andrew and Damien did a bottle shop run to buy beers. With the time it took them to wait for a three-wheeler to arrive, the return trip to town took about an hour! The first day at the hotel wasn’t going well, but it got even worse when we were talked into eating dinner at the hotel (it was obviously too cumbersome to get all of us into town and back). Infuriatingly, the food on the dinner
buffet was stone cold. I was hungry and ate more than I should have… in hindsight I’m surprised no one got food poisoning from that meal.
We (our group) had the whole ‘hotel’ to ourselves, so a few of us stayed up after dinner and had some drinks in the dining room. We clawed back a somewhat pleasant and fun night from what had been an average evening.
The next morning we were up at 4:30am again, but thankfully managed to fall back asleep. At 7am we decided to go for a walk to check out the area around the hotel. We had been so caught up in the comedy of errors at the hotel the previous day that it wasn’t until the morning that we turned our minds to the beautiful area we were in. The climate was cooler at the higher altitude in the hills, with a very pleasant 20-25 degrees during the day, and cooler nights of about 15 degrees. It was the first time on our trip that I’d smelt that moist earthy dampness of early morning country air. It was very pleasant after the heat of the coastal areas and the central plains.
Our hotel was in a suburban area with a few nice views, but walking on the small road with public buses screaming around the blind corners didn’t make for a pleasant walk. We returned to the hotel in time for breakfast, and were very pleased to see that it was light years better than dinner. The spread included fruit, toast with jams, fried eggs,
string hoppers,
kiri bath (coconut milk rice), chicken curry,
aloo kiri hodi (potato in coconut milk gravy),
seeni sambol (caramelised onion relish),
pol pani (crepes filled with sweetened coconut) and pots of tea. In the spirit of being adventurous, I tried everything! I enjoyed all of it, but the
kiri bath was so filling that I could only have half a piece. The
pol pani crepes were without a doubt the star of the meal. Breakfast definitely went a long way to redeeming the hotel from the depths of that bad dinner we’d been served the night before.
After our extended breakfast, we dashed off to get ready for our 9am gathering to visit the tea estates around the neighbouring town of
Haputale. The drive to Dambatenne Tea Estate took us through dramatically beautiful
scenery. The clipped tea plantations were interspersed with small patches of verdant native forests, which gave a tiny impression of what these hills looked like before they were clear-felled for the tea plantations more than a hundred years ago. We drove past a wide spread of buildings ranging from palatial plantation manager’s homes with immaculate gardens to enormous block-like tea factories, and many clusters of small structures of varying quality for the tea factory workers.
We rose higher and higher to a height of about 1800 metres, and the buildings in the valleys below started looking toy-like. The road became narrower as we ascended, and there was a hair raising moment when our minibus came face to face with a public bus. The road rules in Sri Lanka seem to always favour the bigger vehicle, so we had to reverse onto a very narrow ledge with a sudden drop just centimetres from the right side of the minibus to let the bus pass. Unfortunately, I was sitting by the window and was hyper-aware of how close our back right wheel was to plunging over the edge. But happily, between Anil and Hemantha, they managed to work it out and
we were all fine. However, I really do believe that in some cases ignorance really is bliss. Ok, maybe not bliss, but the people not sitting at the right hand side windows were a lot calmer than those of us looking out the windows in terror!
We finally made it to the Dambatenne Tea Estate. This factory was set up in 1890 by Sir Thomas Lipton (yes, of that famous brand) and claims to be the ‘longest’ tea factory. I wasn’t sure why that is worthy of note from a tea point of view, but I’m sure there is a reason they brag about it. We were there for a pre-booked tour of the factory, but had to wait for more walk-ins to join the tour group.
Given all the good reviews I’d read about this tea factory tour, I was surprised that the tour was less than impressive. I think we were unlucky and got a very indifferent guide who was bordering on impolite at times. He led a much-too-large group through the factory floors and cramped spaces with large machinery, while parroting a barely audible script. We’ve been on a few tea factory tours (once on
this trip, and previously in India and Malaysia), and this was the only reason I could even begin to make sense of what he was saying. We started at the entry point where the tea leaves get weighed, then walked to the various areas of machinery that undertook the processes of fermentation, rolling, drying, cutting, sieving and grading the tea. The grading of tea is based on the final size of the processed tea leaves (the bigger the leaf, the higher the grading). There was some tea for sale as we walked outside, but we were all so unimpressed with the factory tour that no one bought any.
Our minibus drove us a little way downhill, where we began a beautiful walk through the Kendon Tea Estate. We walked along stony paths that followed the contours of the hills laden with tea bushes, and around exposed slopes with quite stunning views to the valleys below that were still shrouded in mist. While we had visited tea plantations before, this was the first time I was able to really have a good close up look at the bushes. I came to the realisation that they were essentially bonsaied tea trees!
I also saw a tea flower for the first time – it’s a small white camellia with a yellow centre. Neither the tea leaves nor flowers have any scent to speak of.
We eventually arrived at a small settlement where Tamil tea estate workers lived. This was our lunch destination, and I was excited. An elderly lady, who was a tea picker, applied a dot of red vermilion powder (called a
tilakaya or
pottu) on our foreheads to welcome us to her small brightly painted home. The wearing of a
pottu was originally part of Hindu religious rituals, but it has since been absorbed into Tamil family traditions and contemporary culture.
I took an instant liking to Pakiawathy, who calmly and graciously let us pile into her small kitchen and watch her cook (and point many cameras at her). There was a wood fired stove in one corner of the smoke blackened kitchen, a wooden table under a small window and a tiled benchtop that ran down the length of the rest of the kitchen. A modest space, but the traditional Tamil food that came out of that kitchen was anything but modest.
Pakiawathy made us a
cup of enjoyable black tea and delicious deep-fried
masala vadais (lentil fritters) to munch on while she cooked lunch. I’ve always found
masala vadais to be too dry, but these hot-off-the-pan ones were crispy on the outside and melty and moist on the inside. I think the key is to eat them freshly fried. She spoke very little English but communication got easier when her daughter Sarojini arrived.
We watched as Pakiawathy expertly worked the wood fire to produce
idlis (steamed cakes made from fermented black lentils and rice),
thosai (thin lacy crepes made of lightly fermented black lentils and rice / called
dosa in India), coconut chutney (a thick mixture of ground coconut, tamarind and chilli) and
dahl. The
idlis were as stodgy and heavy as I remembered, but the
thosai and coconut chutney were superb and probably the best I’ve had. Dessert was
sago payasam (sago pudding with brown sugar, coconut milk, spices, cashews and raisins). It was seriously delicious, and I will definitely be making this when we get back home.
I thoroughly enjoyed this lunch experience, and I was so glad that we had been able to spend time with Pakiawathy in a tea
estate factory workers village. The poverty in the village was very evident, and given how filthy rich the tea industry is, it raises my hackles that the people who are the back bone of the industry and work the hardest, get so very little. So I was especially glad that these families have an opportunity to earn extra income through these sort of grass-root tourism ventures.
After lunch we had to climb back up to the main road where Anil and Hemantha were waiting for us in our minibus. Thila was leading the way on a very narrow lane between the village houses, with us walking single file behind him. He suddenly stopped dead in his tracks and in a panicked voice asked us to back up the way we’d come. We’d heard that snakes love living among the tea bushes, so we assumed he’d seen a snake. It turned out to be a dog sleeping across the sunny path, who apparently ‘wouldn’t move’ and ‘made a noise’, so Thila was too scared to walk around it. Pakiawathy had been watching us from her kitchen window and came rushing out to see what was amiss. She laughed when she
saw the dog and casually waved him off the path. The funniest part was that as the dog shuffled past us, we saw that he had one of those friendly grinny Labrador faces and happily wagged his tail at all of us. Thila didn’t live that down for the rest of the trip! 😊
On the way back to the hotel we were dropped off in the town of Bandarawela to have a look around. As serenely beautiful as its surroundings hills and mountains are, the actual town centre is a slightly hardnosed commercial space that has been very badly planned around a noisy bus station and roundabout. We walked around for a bit, but were uninspired to explore very much. It might have been a better experience if we had been in the town when its big weekly market took place. Very unusually for us, we were waiting at the rendezvous point well before the minibus came back to pick us up. Even though I sound unimpressed by Bandarawela, I would much rather patronise a town where locals live and work than a tourist-heavy town like Ella (which is the other town option that provides access to the
tea estates in this area).
When we got back to the hotel I realised I’d been so caught up with writing about the not-so-fabulous aspects of our hotel on our first day that I completely overlooked mentioning one very fabulous feature of the hotel – the hotel doggie Bullet! At first Bullet appeared stand-offish and ignored us, but it only took a bit of encouragement from Andrew before he let his guard down and completely revealed his inner puppy self. It became quite obvious that pats, cuddles, tummy rubs and playing were alien concepts that he didn’t quite know how to deal with… but he knew he loved them!
That afternoon a few of us gathered for drinks in the balcony area outside our hotel room. Phil had bought a bottle of local arrack, which we polished off quite swiftly. It wasn't as strongly flavoured as I had imagined – in fact it was quite smooth and had a lovely coconut and vanilla flavour. We loved it so much that we bought a couple more bottles when we stopped at the Cargill’s bottle shop on our way to dinner.
We were supposed to have had dinner at
a Planter’s House that night, to experience the fusion food and exclusive lifestyle that the British tea planters set up for themselves during the colonial period. However, the destructive floods Sri Lanka suffered in 2016 had devastated the house that had been selected for this meal, so an alternative family had been sourced.
Dinner at the family home of Daminda and Indrika on the outskirts of Bandarawela was lovely, but a lesser reproduction (almost) of the Sinhalese cooking methods and food we’d already had at the beautiful Sinhalese family house in Kandy. As before, we were welcomed with a betel leaf and watched the cooking of
brinjal moju (fried eggplant pickle with green chillies and red onions), before being led into a dining room where dinner was served. Dinner consisted of rice, chicken curry, potato curry,
polos (young jackfruit) curry,
amberalla (wild mango) curry,
dahl and the
brinjal moju. Dessert was, again, a
kitul (fish tail palm) flour pudding, but this time without the
jaggery (palm sugar) and coconut milk syrup that I liked. Even though the meal was enjoyable, and through no fault of theirs, we were disappointed because we weren’t getting an experience different to one we’d
already had a few nights before.
Back at the hotel, we rugged up in warm jackets and hoodies and settled in for a few drinks on the balcony. Between eight of us, quite a few bottles of beer and two big bottles of arrack were drunk. We solved world problems, listened to music and shared life and travel stories. It was a fabulous night, and at some point there was a special performance of Mack the Knife by Damien, with Andrew on ‘acoustic’ (read: air) instruments. Andrew and I called it quits at midnight, but not before Andrew had a slight disagreement with the clear glass balcony door. 😊
Next we travel south-east to Yala National Park, where we will hopefully spot more wild animals.
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D MJ Binkley
Dave and Merry Jo Binkley
Integrity lacking
Integrity is doing the right thing when people are not watching. Too bad those backpackers lacked it. Glad you were able to secure your proper seats. We love train travel also. Again-- love all the food and drink.