CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
A one-way ride of 182 km, Kandy to Wellawaya - roughly 3 h 54 in the saddle. On the way it passes Nuwara Eliya, Horton Plains and Ella. The stored terrain estimate reaches about 1,350 m; a measured road-elevation profile is not available. A steady touring day rather than a sprint.
Expect company on a summer weekend. Early is better than fast. For about 29 km this is Sri Lanka Hill Country Road, a road with a name of its own and a reason for it.
Kandy is the heart of Sri Lanka's hill country, a city built around an artificial lake in a bowl of green hills at about five hundred metres. For over two hundred years it was the capital of the last Sinhalese kingdom, which held out against the Portuguese, Dutch and finally the British, who took it in 1815. Its great treasure is the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic, the Sri Dalada Maligawa, which houses what is believed to be a tooth of the Buddha. The temple draws pilgrims every day, with drumming and offerings at set times, and the whole city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Around 110,000 people live here, so fuel, supplies and hotels are easy.
Read the complete Kandy write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Kandy is where the day begins. Next is Nuwara Eliya.
Nuwara Eliya is the town where Sri Lanka's tea planters and colonial officials tried to recreate an English country town, and the result is delightfully peculiar. It sits at nearly nineteen hundred metres in the hill country, in a bowl of green slopes below the island's highest peak, Pidurutalagala, and the air is cool and often damp. The architecture is a mixture of Tudor-style cottages with roses in the gardens, a red-brick post office, a golf course, a racecourse and a gentlemen's club with trophy heads on the walls. It earned the nickname Little England, and the locals have never quite let it go. The town was established in the 1840s, when the explorer and administrator Samuel Baker set up a settlement here, and became the favourite summer retreat of the British who ran the island.
Read the complete Nuwara Eliya write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Nuwara Eliya comes up about 76 km into the recorded legs. Next is Horton Plains.
Horton Plains is a high, windswept plateau in the middle of Sri Lanka, and nothing in the tropical lowlands prepares you for it. At more than two thousand metres, it is a land of rolling grassland, scattered patches of twisted cloud forest, tumbling streams and cool mist, and the air feels more like Scotland than the tropics. The plains are a national park and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, part of the Central Highlands, and are home to species found nowhere else, including a number of endemic birds, orchids and the rhododendron that flowers in red along the paths. Sambar deer, the largest deer on the island, graze on the open grass, and leopards live in the forest, though they are rarely seen.
Read the complete Horton Plains write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 105 km into the recorded legs you reach Horton Plains. Next is Ella.
Ella is a small town on the edge of a huge drop, and the whole place has arranged itself around the view. It sits at about a thousand metres in the hills of Sri Lanka's Uva province, where the gap between two mountain ridges opens onto the plains to the south, and on a clear morning you can look straight through it and see the land falling away in layers toward the coast. Cafes and guesthouses line the main street, and the town has a relaxed, international travellers' feel, with banana pancakes on the menu and a stream of backpackers coming off the train from Kandy.
Read the complete Ella write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Ella, late in the day. Next is Wellawaya.
Wellawaya is a junction town in the dry south-east of Sri Lanka, and its main claim to fame is that the road to the coast and the road to the hills part company here. Around ten thousand people live in the town, which sits on flat, scrubby land at the foot of the escarpment, with the Uva highlands rising behind. Ella and Haputale, both in the hills, are a short climb away, and the contrast is sharp: from cool tea terraces you drop through bends and waterfalls to a hot, flat plain dotted with palms, paddy and thorn scrub.
Read the complete Wellawaya write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Finish at Wellawaya. That is the ride.
Kandy → Nuwara Eliya is 76 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Nuwara Eliya → Horton Plains is 29 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Horton Plains → Ella is 50 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Ella → Wellawaya is 27 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.