Sri Lanka, 2018
Day 18: February 5
Haputale - Ella
Sri Lanka, 2018
Itinerary
In the morning we head to a popular attraction - Lipton’s Seat. This is a viewpoint with beautiful views of the tea plantations, where, supposedly, Uncle Lipton himself once sat. What is definitely true is that in 1890 Thomas Lipton decided to buy 5 tea plantations in these parts. Here, in the same year, he founded a tea factory (which we will pass by). The factory is still operating today.
Thanks to the fact that Lipton grew and made tea himself, he was able to sell it in England at a much lower price than his competitors. This is how the world-famous Lipton tea came to be.
The road to Lipton’s Seat is very picturesque (and very narrow).
On the way to Lipton’s Seat
This is the view from Lipton’s Seat
Wolf with Lipton
On the way back, Volchiy suggests stopping to take a walk among the tea plantations and pick a few tea leaves. Volchiy wants to try drying tea himself.
Tea plantations and a tea picker
Tea picking
We stop by the Dambatenne factory (the one founded by Lipton) to buy a pack of tea and then head on to Ella.
There are only rave reviews about Ella on the internet; everyone seems to love it here. We spent a long time looking for a hotel and got exhausted. Prices here are even higher than by the sea, and they are very reluctant to bargain. We figured there are enough tourists here, so there is no point in lowering the room rate. And it’s not even just the high prices, but the fact that the price does not match the quality. At one of the hotels, Volchiy even couldn’t hold back and said, “This is Sri Lanka! And your prices are like in Europe.”
In the end, we managed to persuade one old lady to put us up in a room with a balcony for $20. She kept saying that on Booking such a room costs $35. We can only shrug — for Asia, those are sky-high prices for such a room....
Our room in Ella
Babuska saw Wolf drying tea and couldn’t understand for a long time what we were doing. She kept wanting to brew some and treat us to tea. We tried to explain to her that we were drying the tea just for fun.
Wolf Drying Tea
Ella is a very touristy little town. The kind where there are ten tourists for every local resident. On the one hand, that’s a good thing — there are lots of cute little restaurants here. We had dinner in one of them. The prices, of course, match.
Food in Ella is, of course, beautiful. But the shawarma was much tastier in wild Balangoda....
The town itself is very small, and there’s not really anywhere to go for a walk here. Many people wrote about the wonderful clean air — we didn’t notice that. There are lots of buses and cars here. The town is being built up at full speed — new hotels are under construction. Because of this, the air is not only not clean, but worse than in Kyiv….