Kandy to Nuwara Eliya or Ambewela Station Transfer with Craft Workshop Stops

Ambewela is the station above Nanu Oya on the hill line, and it is a useful drop point if you are joining the train there rather than at the busier station below. This transfer will take you to either, or simply to your hotel in Nuwara Eliya.

The stops on the way up are the craft ones rather than the usual waterfall-and-factory set. A gem museum and cutting workshop first — Sri Lanka has mined sapphires for two thousand years, the trade runs through Ratnapura and Kandy, and seeing a stone cut and graded explains a great deal about why the shops in every tourist town sell the same thing at wildly different prices. Then a woodcarving studio, where the Kandyan motifs are cut into ebony and jak with hand tools, and a batik workshop where wax is drawn on cloth by hand and the fabric dyed in layers over several days.

The road then climbs through Ramboda and into the estates, and the last hour is tea on both sides.

Drop-off is at your Nuwara Eliya hotel or at Ambewela station, agreed when you book.

Kandy was the last capital of the Sinhalese kings, holding out against the Portuguese and Dutch until the British took it in 1815, and the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic on the lake is why it matters: the relic, believed to be a tooth of the Buddha, is the most sacred object on the island and its custody once legitimised the kingship. The relic chamber opens for puja three times a day, at about 5:30, 9:30 and 18:30, when the drumming starts and the queue moves past the casket. Dress covers shoulders and knees, shoes come off at the entrance, and the Esala Perahera in July or August parades the casket on an elephant through the city for ten nights.