What it's like to ride Sri Lanka's famed Kandy to Ella train line
Chugging through the Highlands, windows down, doors open, is the best way to see the country’s emerald interior unfold — and this route is often lauded as one of the world’s greatest train journeys.
Boarding the Kandy to Ella train is a bun fight I hadn’t envisaged. A dog has strayed into the station hangar and is tugging on a sari, leading to shrieks from a group of local women as passengers attempt to board from both sides of the train. Suitcases are being pushed through open windows, and the smell of spicy fried samosas floods into cabins, along with their owners. Heat as sticky as bubblegum hangs under ceiling fans.
Lauded as one of Asia’s most scenic rides, the train’s local nickname is podi manike, meaning ‘little honey’ — manike being a term of endearment that husbands call their wives in Sri Lanka. It’s far from a tourist train; its timetable has long been tied to the ebbs and flows of local life. The British laid the line’s foundations in the 19th century, gouging tunnels through mountains and fording gorges with viaducts. For all the route’s beauty, it was conceived as a service line: to transport tea leaves and other crops, as well as people, through the central hills.
While the original vintage train cars have long been retired, local life continues much as it has ever done, both inside and outside the cabin. On the outskirts of Kandy, a highland town known for its Buddhist temples and lakes, a monk in saffron robes waits beneath a red-silk umbrella to see us off from the side of the track. And as we gain elevation, moving out of the suburbs, other onlookers seem invested in our progress. Field workers down their scythes to stand and watch as we chug by, their lunch bags hung on tree branches around them.
It isn’t long before we’re passing a succession of tiny stations painted candyfloss pink and brahmin blue, bringing to the platforms guards dressed like brigadiers in bright-white trousers and station-keepers with starched khaki jackets and immaculately groomed moustaches. “We wish you all a very happy, comfortable and safe journey,” announces a Tannoy in English, as we pull up at a remote, empty platform backed by a wall of mountain.
After a towering Hindu temple marks our arrival at Hatton station, with a kaleidoscope of colours above the tin-roofed houses, the landscape balloons. The deeper into the hills we go, the more striking the lack of development becomes. When the valleys open out to reveal ripples of mountains climbed by tea bushes I go to sit at the open doorway, joining locals who dangle their legs out of the carriages. At points, the walls of foliage are so close I can reach out and brush my fingers along them from my seat, inhaling the musty scent of damp earth and rock.
Besides the flow of hawkers selling bags of cut guava and mango, curried cashew nuts and chocolate bars, we gain very few extra passengers until the station of Nanu Oya — a transfer hub for the nearby hill town of Nuwara Eliya. Surrounded by tea plantations and nicknamed ‘Little England’ for its links to British colonialists, Nuwara Eliya’s Georgian-style mansions are just out of sight across a forest plain of leggy peeling eucalypts and bushy rhododendrons.
Today, Nuwara Eliya is a popular base for the tea estate tours and stays that have made the Central Highlands a much-loved travel stop. Sri Lanka produces more than 300 million kilograms of tea per year, much of it grown in this region, coming out of estates whose names give clues to their founders. Shortly after Nanu Oya, Elgin Falls looms outside — an 80ft slender spout of water that looks as though it’s being poured down the mountainside by a giant teapot. It takes the name of the tea estate on which it flows, which in turn is named after a town in Scotland linked to the estate’s original planters.
It’s the cooler temperatures and humid, misty valleys that make Sri Lanka’s Central Highlands such fertile ground for tea plantations, but I don’t get any sense of the temperature dropping until we approach the tiny station of Pattipola. Here, as clouds chase the train, a hand-painted sign informs us that we’ve reached the track’s highest stop at 6,225ft. My own journey’s end comes further down the track at Haputale, an unremarkable station but for the crowds of locals who emerge from nowhere to board as I depart. A lifeline through the jungle, the train’s engine roars as it sets off again — and, just like that, it’s gone.
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