Trekking Through Tea Country

Blogging on the train from Kandy to Bandarawela:

The sensory sensations of the train are so amazing I need to get them down while we are going so I don’t lose them. The roar, the rattle, the slow steady sway, windows open but no breeze at all, just the loud thwack thwack thwack of the wheels – we are like blood pumping through the veins of the country. A group of boys playing music with guitar and drum, beating like a steady heart thrum, singing an accompaniment to thebackground cacophony of our journey. Ancient woven tapestry seats, threadbare but comfortable – could be the most comfortable of any journey yet in Sri Lanka in this old wooden “observation car.”

I had been anticipating something with big windows all around but apparently the observation car is just the last car on the train with big windows on the end and all the seats face backwards. There was nothing luxurious about it – fan-cooled by old rotating electric fans on the ceiling, windows that were either opened or closed and nothing in between, and a very smelly bathroom at the back of the car (certainly not the worst I have ever experienced, but the kind where women emerge with pained and horrified expressions on their faces – at least it was not a squatter). Mid-day an elderly man came through selling hot peanuts roasted in oil with spices and curry leaves and served in little paper sacks handmade from recycled graph paper with someone’s careful mathematical calculations still clearly visible. An incredibly delicious snack.

As the day went on we went higher and higher into landscape that became more stunning and dramatic every minute. Soon it began to rain and grow cooler and we were soon wearing every piece of clothing we had in our daypacks since our big luggage had been passed through a window and stowed high on the overhead luggage racks. People in the stations we passed were bundled in fleece jackets and many wore hats. Most train stations had beautiful gardens and many had topiary with the name of their town spelled out in shrubbery.  

The train moved quite slowly, maybe 25 to 35 miles per hour, and we did not reach our destination of Bandarawela until nearly 4 o’clock. Rough Guide describes Bandarawela as a “scruffy” place and that is probably the best description. Not a place that caters to  tourists in any way, surprisingly most of the shops were open and doing a brisk business on Sunday night (as opposed to Kandy on a Saturday night, a thriving city that was strangely closed up tight and quiet by 9 pm.) Another half hour on a windy mountain road brought us to our barebones hotel, which was apparently better than the last few places Intrepid tours had stayed and which was not very nice at all. Our room hung out over the highway and had nothing in it except for a couple of beds (comfortable mattresses is the best I can say) with very thin blankets. I have never seen a more threadbare towel. It got so cold by bedtime that I slept in jeans, socks and my fleece jacket – who knew I would bring a fleece jacket to Sri Lanka for sleepwear!

We spent the evening at a local home learning how to make rice and curry, the traditional food of Sri Lanka, cutting and cooking vegetables, mixing spices, learning everything from how to grate coconut on a spike stuck out of a bench to how to prepare “kankun” the local spinach greens. Then we all sat down to eat the delicious meal we had prepared, sans alcohol. Drinking is very important to this group, and out of desperation I have drunk things I would never have chosen to drink from straight whiskey and vodka to arrack, the local spirits distilled from coconut. Mostly there is Lion beer in 16 oz bottles, which I tried to avoid unless nothing else is available.

In the morning we returned to the station and took the train back to Idalgashinna to start our trek through the tea plantations to Udevaria.

We had to repack just what we needed for the two day trip into our daypacks and then our big bags were sent on to Haputale for storage. Needless to say, I was more than a little nervous about doing the trek, not sure if my back would hold up or whether my bad shoulder could handle carrying a pack of any weight at all, not sure how my knees would manage any steep downhill paths. When I booked the Sri Lanka tour, I had originally planned not go on this part of the journey since I didn’t think my body would hold up, but I have discovered on this trip that I am a perfectly good long distance walker and since I knew this was really touted as the highlight of the Sri Lanka tour I decided I would go and push my personal limits.

The first hour was uphill through jungle and pine forests, not unlike hiking at home. We emerged into the highlands to awesome magical views of mountains and terraced fields of tea with unbelievable long-range vistas of distance lakes and mountains. The weather was cool and not too sunny – perfect trekking weather. We continued up through a few villages where the tea pickers live huddled together in small squalid little row houses, sometimes painted colorfully, an occasional TV antenna, and lots of laundry hanging everywhere drying (probably because nothing every really dries in the high mountains). The road leading up and leading away from each village was always littered with garbage and trash as though the people just throw their stuff out of the village limits to get rid of it and then probably it washes down a distance in the rain. But everyone was always delighted to see us and promptly posed for pictures and all the children asked for “steel pen” – I guess that what they want most is pens to write with for school, not sure why nobody told us to bring

pens, it would have been an easy thing to give away.  Materially they are so poor but no one in the world is richer when it comes to the natural beauty of their surroundings.

After a tea and fruit break at the side of the road (Dusha, one of our local trek guides actually boiled water on a fire and served us tea in plastic mugs), we began heading downwards which proved to be much harder on my legs, knees and feet than going up. The path was sometimes paved with big rock paving stones that you had to step carefully on from one to the next or it was rough and rocky and the going got tough at times. But we stopped to photograph and chat with some of the tea pickers, who work 8 hours a day, 24 days a month and earn about $7 a day, depending on how much tea they can pick in a day to fill the gunny sacks they carry on their heads and back. They pick rain or shine and apparently they don’t mind the intense afternoon downpours because it makes the tea weigh more and they can earn more money that way.

Clouds and mist began to roll in and the distant views began to be obscured. We did not take a lot of breaks and despite the fact that half our group is nearly 60 or over, we made it to our rest house in record time by 12:15, faster than any previous group. Lucky for us, because 15 minutes later torrential rain began and did not stop for the next 8 hours except for one brief afternoon interlude where I quickly ran out and took pictures in the “village” if you could call it that. A few houses with absolutely amazing vegetable and flower gardens (the hill people are very good gardeners), a “hospital” that upon closer inspection was just empty rooms but they told me a doctor showed up every day for a few hours. All of the land is owned by the tea plantations, the people with private houses just lease their land in some complicated way I didn’t understand. I was astounded to see nearly every kind of flower you might ever grow indoors and outdoors in New Hampshire, including alium, impatiens, marigolds, cosmos, zinnias, daisies, roses, delphinium, salvia, verbena, lilies, daylilies, alstromeria, trumpet flowers, datura, morning glories – just to name a few I kept track of. It is a flower growers dreamland.

The lodge where we stayed was a solid stone building with 3 bedrooms for the 10 of us (two didn’t come) and 1 for Indika and our guides, Shiva and Dusha, both of whom were Intrepid tour leaders in training and who had only been speaking English for a few years, having learned from speaking with tourists and who communicated beautifully. I am always very impressed with those who can learn a language without formal classes.

We were suddenly faced with hours together with nothing to do except recover from the morning’s exertions and rest up for the next day. By 6:15 we had eaten dinner and had a long evening in front of us, but Shiva brought a conga drum and he and Indika and Dusha sang beautiful songs for us in Sinhalese and Tamil, the two Sri Lankan languages and then we each sang songs from our countries. It was interesting to think about what music was American, there are really so many choices from blues to Lady Gaga…

Singing together was strange and a bit embarrassing, like sleepover camp, but we laughed a lot at the absurdity of it all and it was a good bonding experience – we even danced.

Another cold damp night, we all seemed to contract some reaction to the dampness from sore throats to allergies (that disappeared as soon as we left the mountains), again sleeping in full clothing with fleece jacket and this time even with a sweater tied on my head ( you lose most of your heat through your head don’tcha know…)

The next morning we were off again – hiking uphill for the first few hours to the Devil’s table and then down for a long long time and the down was hard and painful. By the end I was last and alone and limping my way to the lunch stop with a spectacular view of the highest waterfall in Sri Lanka.

By the time we arrived at our next mediocre guesthouse in Haputale, we were filthy and tired and all we could think about was hot showers (and they had great hot water in Haputale). A short afternoon interlude learning to drive a tuk-tuk in a cricket field. I opted out of the Hindu temple visit – didn’t feel like I could walk any extra steps.

Two days later my knee still hurts a lot but I don’t regret a minute of it.