Today we just had a pretty easy day exploring Ella. We started with getting breakfast across the road and finally getting Egg Hoppers which Rama has been telling us to try. They were pretty good.
We were then picked up for a drive out to Liptons Seat. A bit of history on this place Lipton’s Seat is a lookout perched high in the Haputale hills, offering sweeping views over lush tea estates, valleys and distant towns. This iconic spot, named after the famous tea pioneer Sir Thomas Lipton, is where he often stopped to admire the surrounding landscape and oversee his plantations. All of thr surrounding fields used to belong to Liptons Tea Estate and I love this persons comment who saud “It was a favourite place for Lipton: a scene almost reminiscent of The Lion King, in which just about everything that the light touched was his”
The story of tea in Sri Lanka is an interesting one. Sri Lanka—known as Ceylon until 1972—was on the brink of transformation when a determined 17-year-old named James Taylor arrived and laid the foundations for what would become one of the nation’s most profitable industries. In 1867, Taylor planted the island’s first tea bushes in Kandy at the Loolecondera Estate. Over the next 30 years, his efforts paid off dramatically, with tea exports soaring from just 10 kilograms to an astonishing 22,900 tonnes.
This remarkable success soon caught the attention of Thomas Lipton, already famous for his expanding grocery empire. By the time tea entered his sights, Lipton was a self-made millionaire whose business had grown from Scotland to across Britain. In 1888, while traveling to Australia, Lipton stopped in Ceylon. Within two years, he and Taylor had formed a partnership—Taylor producing the tea and Lipton marketing and selling it throughout Europe and the United States. Their idea was to make tea for the general public not just the wealthy.
Anyway it paid off and this place is stunning. We had to hire a tuk tuk driver at the bottom of the tea plantatsion as the way up is small and very windy. The tuk tuk sriver was great and he stopped and showed us the tea flowers and the differences in the leaves.
The views up were beautiful we passed a lot of Tamil workers who wanted to chat, and passed through a few of the small Tamil villages nestled into the country side.
On the way up we spent most of it driving though the clouds. So we knew at the top we would be pretty much just be in the clouds. That definetly proved to be the case.
We still explored the fields up there which was cool.
We stopped to have a tea at the little resturant there. We had a stunnning view of clouds. Ha Ha… I am sure thats not what Liton was looking at.
The drive back down in the tuk tuk was much quicker. It was even more cloudy on the way down.
Liptons seat is an awesome place to visit. Well worth the trip out. On the way back we stopped at Nine Arches Bridge. I have seen this on so mnay blogs and vlogs and at no point have I seen the hill that is required to go down to get there. We took a tuk tuk down most of it which was terrifying. Then it was a walk down a huge hill and I mean super steep. The brudge itself is stunning but we were not wearing the right shoes to have been mountain goating down a hill.
We headed to Matey Curry to try some highly rated local food. It was pretty good. We also saw a cow the stopped all the traffic as it walked though the Ella tunnel.
It poured all afternoon so we had a quiet one back at the hotel. We snuck out to get dinner and Anthony wanted the meat platter. Which was a ridiculous amount of meat.
We watched the NYE celebrations from our hotel balcony. All the resturants had bought their own fireworks and were setting them off in the street. It was like a war zone and bitsof firework were flying everywhere.
HAppy New Year from Srilanka.