Ella Tea Factory, Ravana Falls and Sri Lankan Cooking Class Day Tour

Ella sits in Uva province, and Uva tea is genuinely distinct — a dry seasonal wind blows across these slopes from June to September and gives the leaf a character tasters can identify blind. A working factory here walks you from the withering troughs through rolling, oxidation and firing to the grading table in about forty-five minutes, and it is the best forty-five minutes anyone spends explaining why one bush becomes six graded products at wildly different prices.

The walking half of the day covers the two things Ella is known for: Little Adam's Peak, 45 minutes up a stepped path for the view through the Gap, and the Nine Arch Bridge, a stone viaduct built without steel during the First World War.

The cooking is the part people remember. Rice and curry is badly named in English — it is not a curry with rice but six or seven separate dishes cooked individually and eaten together. You grate coconut on a hiramanaya, grind the spice paste on a stone, and cook in clay pots over a fire that behaves nothing like a gas ring.

Then you eat it, which after a morning of walking is the right order.

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.