Kandy to Nuwara Eliya Scenic Transfer with an Optional Nanu Oya Train Drop

The road from Kandy to Nuwara Eliya gains 1,400 metres in 80 kilometres, which is why it takes three hours rather than one and why treating it as a transfer with stops is the only sensible way to do it.

The climb runs through Gampola and Pussellawa, and about halfway up the forest gives way to tea and does not change again. Ramboda Falls is the natural first stop, a 100-metre drop visible from the road with a short walk to the base, and the Bhakta Hanuman temple above it is a Ramayana site busy with Indian pilgrims rather than tourists.

A working tea factory follows, taking the leaf from the withering troughs through rolling, oxidation and firing to the grading table in about forty-five minutes. The viewpoints on the upper stretch are the part a bus drives past — there are two or three places where the valley opens completely and a private car can simply stop.

The useful detail is the ending. You can be dropped at your Nuwara Eliya hotel, or at Nanu Oya station in time for the afternoon train to Ella — which matters, because Nuwara Eliya has no station of its own and Nanu Oya is ten kilometres out of town.

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.