Ella Highlights Half-Day Tour: Nine Arch Bridge, Halpewatte Tea Factory and Ravana Falls

This is the compact, inexpensive version of Ella, and it covers most of what people come for without the dawn start of the full-day trips.

Halpewatte is the largest tea factory in the Uva region and one of the more genuinely instructive to visit — the tour follows the leaf from the withering troughs through rolling, oxidation and firing to the grading table, and it ends on a terrace with a view over the estates and a cup of the grade that does not leave the country.

The Mahameunawa Asapuwa is the stop most visitors have never heard of. It is a forest monastery rather than a temple, quiet, unornamented and used, and it is a very different atmosphere from the painted, crowded temples on the standard route.

The Nine Arch Bridge follows: 91 metres of stone viaduct 24 metres above a gorge, built during the First World War without steel because the steel had gone to Europe. Trains cross roughly every two hours and are routinely late.

Ravana Falls, a broad cascade beside the road south of town, closes the afternoon.

What this trip does not include is the walks. If you want Little Adam's Peak or Ella Rock, take a full day.

Ella is a village at 1,040 metres in the southern hill country, reached by the train from Kandy that most people rate the finest railway journey in Asia, and its sights are all within a few kilometres: the Nine Arch Bridge, a brick viaduct of 1921 in a gorge of tea, which a train crosses several times a day; Little Adam's Peak, a 40-minute walk through tea to a ridge; Ella Rock, a harder three-hour climb; and Ravana Falls on the road down to Wellawaya. Mornings are clear and afternoons in the wet months bring cloud into the gap, so the walks are done early. Tuk-tuks are the transport, and every guesthouse can find one.