Uva Village Life by Jeep from Ella with a Cooking Class and Home Lunch

Ella is a walking town surrounded by a farming district, and almost nobody who comes for the walks sees the district. This day goes into it.

The villages below the escarpment are paddy and smallholding country, worked by families rather than estates. You go out by jeep and then by bullock cart — which is how people here actually moved goods until recently, and which is slow, bumpy and revealing.

The irrigation is the part worth paying attention to. The tank-and-channel system that waters this land is the same technology Sri Lanka has been running for two thousand years: a reservoir, a network of channels, and a village-level order deciding which field takes water when. Having it explained by someone who farms with it is a different thing from reading about it.

The cooking is the centre of the day. Rice and curry is six or seven separate dishes cooked individually and eaten together, and you take part: grating coconut on a hiramanaya, grinding the spice paste on a stone, cooking in clay pots over a wood fire. Then you sit down and eat it with the family that helped you make it.

Travellers consistently rate days like this above the big-ticket sights, and they are right to.

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.