World's End

We booked a trip to the national park through our hotel. A jeep costs 3500 rs. An Australian guy was joining us, so we got a bit of a discount on the trip. We left the hotel at 6 AM, and there was no breakfast—just straight out the door. It was a 1.5-hour drive to Horton Plains National Park. Our guide spoke good English, so we could ask him a ton of questions. He was Buddhist, but his wife was Catholic. He was quite fond of their president, who managed to put an end to the civil war. He didn’t seem too bothered by the fact that the president later passed a law allowing him to stay in power for the rest of his life. Many people think it smells a bit like a potential dictatorship is on the horizon... When Sri Lanka was a British colony, the English invited Tamils from India to come work on their tea and coffee plantations. The local Sri Lankan population wasn’t interested in those jobs. They had jobs they were happy with, so they didn’t need the hard work of picking tea leaves for low wages. From our guide's perspective, the civil war stemmed from unreasonable demands from the Tamil minority in the country. They wanted their own land, their own government, and their own laws—essentially complete independence from Sri Lanka. On top of that, they wanted free access to Sri Lanka, but Sri Lankans wouldn’t be allowed free access to the new Tamil state. The Sri Lankan, Buddhist government opposed this desire, arguing that there’s already a Tamil area in India. Their point was that Tamils have lived in Sri Lanka for several generations, they were born here, and they hold citizenship, so they are part of Sri Lanka. Some Tamil organizations disagreed, which led to a civil war that lasted from 1983 to 2009. The current president put an end to the unrest by taking out all the Tamil Tigers. He also offered some positions in the government to Tamils so they could feel more included in the country. We haven’t yet heard the opposing side’s story about why the war escalated and what they think about the outcome. Are they satisfied, or is there still some lingering discontent hidden somewhere in the Tamil minority? It costs about 20 USD to enter the national park, which is the only national park in the country where it’s not mandatory to have a guide. The trails are well-marked. It’s best to get to World’s End before 9 AM, as the fog and clouds start rolling in. An 18 km route took us past the viewpoints Mini World’s End and World’s End, as well as Baker’s Fall. The largest animals living here are leopards and deer, but we didn’t see much of them. The trail isn’t difficult and is mostly flat, so anyone can walk it. Four hours later, we were on our way back to Nuwara Eliya, where we planned to visit a tea factory called Labookellie, which is over 100 years old. Pedro Estate is closer to the city, but it’s a much smaller tea factory, and you even have to pay an entrance fee there. The tour cost about 333 rs per person, and there were three of us in total. To our great disappointment, the Tamil festival was still going on today, so there were no women working in the fields. However, there was a tour of the factory and a tea tasting afterward. A factory must have at least seven areas for the women to rotate picking. Each bush can only be picked every seventh day. In the meantime, it needs to rest to produce new shoots. It was a bit cheaper to buy tea from this factory. It cost between 180 and 240 rs per box. We left with a big bag of different flavors for 1820 rs. Later in the day, we rented a car to take us to Dalhousie, from where you can hike up Adam’s Peak, a sacred mountain. The town is a three-hour drive away, but it only cost 6000 rs to rent a car with a driver. It felt like a long trip since the road twists and turns constantly and is full of potholes. There are tea plantations everywhere. It’s not hard to see why Sri Lanka is the second-largest tea producer in the world after China. On our little stretch, we passed between 15 and 20 tea factories, each owning a large area of tea fields. The family at our new little hotel makes the best food we’ve had so far. Of course, they served rice and curry, but it was really delicious, and there were plenty of small curry dishes—tofu, pumpkin, beans, dal, etc.—to choose from.