At about 1,900 metres, Nuwara Eliya is the highest town of any size in Sri Lanka, and it was built by the British as a place to escape the heat of the lowlands. They called it Little England, and the name still fits in a slightly surreal way: Tudor-style hotels and bungalows, a golf course, a racecourse, a park with flower beds, a post office in red brick, and a lake where people ride pedal boats. Around it all, the hills are covered with tea, and the mist rolls in most afternoons. It can be cold here, especially at night, and the locals wear woolly hats and jackets.
The town was founded in the nineteenth century, after a British explorer came across the plateau while hunting elephants, and it became a hill station for colonial officials and planters. Tea followed, after a fungal disease destroyed the island's coffee plantations in the 1870s, and the hills around Nuwara Eliya now produce some of the finest tea in Sri Lanka, light and fragrant. Several estates near the town have factories that offer tours, where you can watch the leaves being withered, rolled, fermented and dried, and taste the results.
Above the town rises Pidurutalagala, at 2,524 metres the highest mountain in Sri Lanka, though its summit is occupied by a military installation and is not open to the public. The area also has a place in the Ramayana: the Seetha Amman temple, a few kilometres outside town, marks the spot where, according to legend, Sita was held captive by Ravana, and the Hakgala botanical gardens nearby are linked to the same story.
The roads into Nuwara Eliya are all climbs, with countless bends through the tea estates, and the views over the hills and valleys are spectacular. The road from Kandy is busy and narrow, with buses and trucks that drive with Sri Lankan enthusiasm, and the road from the south, through Hakgala, is quieter. Nuwara Eliya has fuel, mechanics, hotels, restaurants and a market selling vegetables grown on the surrounding slopes, carrots, leeks, cabbages, which seem out of place in the tropics. Evenings are cold, so pack warm layers.