La Gringa y Su Esposo: Ella – Tea Plantations and Little Adam’s Peak

February 27, 2019

Ella is a small town surrounded by hills and tea plantations. The first thing we noticed was all the white people. We’ve been in the minority so far on the trip. We walked the kilometer from the train station to our homestay on the side of town near Little Adam’s Peak (seemingly no connection to Adam’s Peak, but nice branding play). There are several places to hike here, several tea factories, and a lot of restaurants catering to tourists as well as a few cheaper restaurants serving delicious local fare. The most common dish in Sri Lanka is rice and curry: lots of rice and at least 5 bowls of curried things. Serious food quantities. It was Tim’s birthday on the 26th (happy birthday Tim!) and so by his request we went to the mexican restaurant nearby. I’ve traveled a fair bit in Asia and I don’t think I have ever seen a mexican restaurant here, nor have the scattered attempts at Mexican cuisine been any good. At all. But seriously – this was almost real tex mex. There was even guac and sour cream! Amazing. The owner/chef had trained at Chili’s in Dubai for 11 years, where he had learned what mexican food should taste like, apparently. Ha!

We visited nearby Kinellan Tea Factory, a place with mixed reviews just outside of town; the tour guide’s English isn’t great, they may or may not be running the factory when you go, so maybe it’s hit or miss. We went early in the afternoon and saw the drying racks, each holding 500 kg of leaves, as well as the entire sorting operation in full swing. The rolling and fermentation (oxidation?) sections weren’t running but the guide was happy to turn on the heavy machinery around us. No western safety standards here!

All of the sorting machines combined to remove stems and separate leaves by size, all spitting out piles of leaves into bins or just in piles on the floor. The workers were barefoot (cleaner than shoes I guess?). The guide had us stick our hand in the stream and pull out some leaves to taste or smell before throwing the rest back in the production pile. Think of that during your next cup of tea. Most of the sorting machines were based on old mechanical designs with some having been installed in the 1930s, but the final machine was an advanced imaging-based sorting system. After looking it up online we learned that it does machine vision assisted air separation by color and quality, picking out silver tips and gold tips for separate packaging.

We also made it up Little Adam’s Peak for another sunrise hike, a short one that only took about 40 minutes to the top walking from the edge of town. We waited for a sunrise that never broke through the clouds before wandering down for breakfast. It ended up raining all afternoon so we caught up on blogging, relaxed, and took a cooking class at our homestay. The cooking class wasn’t the best, but we did get to see how all the vegetable curries are prepared. Just about everything had the same set of spices with a little variation, all prepared with a “healthy” (as in large) dose of coconut oil and freshly prepared coconut milk.

We arranged a taxi on to Udawalawe, stopping at a waterfall outside of town before heading on to Safari.