Ella works because several things coincide - a dramatic valley gap with a view 40 kilometres south, tea estates within walking distance of the village, the Nine Arch Bridge as the island’s most photographed structure, and a genuinely good independent food and cafe culture. The village is small, the pace is right, and at the correct time of morning, early, mist still in the valley, it is very close to perfect.
Nuwara Eliya
The colonial hill station at 1,868 metres - still faintly Victorian
Nuwara Eliya was built by the British to feel like home, and the result is genuinely strange and wonderful - a Victorian post office, a racecourse, a hill club with a dress code and tea estates stretching across every visible hillside. The cold air, the colonial buildings and the estate landscape combine into something unlike anywhere else in South Asia.
