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Destination Category: Cloud Roads and Tea Horizons - Hill Country and Highland Landscapes

Sri Lanka’s central highlands are a world apart from the coastal and lowland island, cooler, quieter, and lit with the particular green intensity of tea country at altitude. The towns here carry a colonial character unlike anything in the lowlands, the viewpoints are dramatic, and the train that winds through the landscape between Kandy and Ella is one of the world’s genuinely great rail experiences. For European and Scandinavian travellers particularly, the hill country tends to be the part of Sri Lanka that stays with them longest.

Hatton and Tea Country

The Hatton area in the Dimbula tea district is where Ceylon tea’s high-grown, cool-climate character is most concentrated and most accessible. The Ceylon Tea Trails estate bungalows on the shores of the Castlereagh and Norton Bridge reservoirs represent some of the finest accommodation in Sri Lanka, working tea estate properties with butler service, colonial interiors, […]

Haputale

Haputale sits on a ridge so narrow the highland landscape falls away dramatically on both sides, to the tea-covered south and the drier lowlands to the north, creating a setting of unusual drama. The walk to Lipton’s Seat above the estates rewards with views extending to three coastlines on a clear morning. Quieter than Ella […]

Horton Plains

Sri Lanka’s highest plateau national park leads to World’s End, a sheer escarpment that drops 870 metres to the lowland jungle below in a single near-vertical movement. The walk across the open montane grassland through cloud forest, past sambar deer and endemic birds, is one of the island’s finest nature experiences. Arriving before 9am before […]

Nuwara Eliya

Built by the British as a hill station retreat at 1,868 metres, Nuwara Eliya is Sri Lanka’s most improbable destination: Tudor-style architecture, rose gardens, a horse racing track, and a climate that makes fireplaces genuinely useful even in March. The surrounding tea estates produce some of the world’s finest high-grown Ceylon teas, and a working […]

Ella

Ella is Sri Lanka’s most loved hill town. The valley below it, a deep basin of tea estate green framed by the Ella Gap, is as visually beautiful in person as in every photograph, and the town’s pace is exactly slow enough to make a day feel genuinely restorative. The Nine Arches Bridge, Little Adam’s […]