Nuwara Eliya, Sri Lanka

ADAMS PEAK
After the cricket test in Kandy finished, Phil headed back to Australia and I headed south to Nuwara Eliya to meet up with two Kiwis I had met at the game - Greg Collinge and Danielle Benjamin. They had also come to Sri Lanka to watch some of the cricket but mostly to see some of the country. They had both been living in London and now were on their way back to the Hawkes Bay in New Zealand to open up a guesthouse near Greg's hometown. When I arrived in Nuwara Eliya I called their cell phone a few times before finally getting through and met them in the main street of town. After finding a place to stay we headed out to the Pedro Tea Estate for a tour of the factory. It was just the three of us and the guide wandering through the different sections of the factory, occasionally picking up and smelling handfuls of tea in different stages of refinement. The tour concluded with the compulsory tea tasting in the guestroom overlooking the estate.

The setting for the Pedro Estate tea plantation

The tea leaf pickers

Tea leaves

Smelling some of the finished product

The following morning we were up at 4am for the two hour drive to the base of Adams Peak, marked by a 30m high standing Buddha statue. We had got ourselves a van and driver for the day. It began to rain lightly and the clouds closed in but it was a superb walk spoilt only by the amount of rubbish and stray dogs. By the time we made the summit I was dripping with sweat and my shirt soaked through. Adams Peak, the 2,224m mountain in the heart of the Sri Lankan hill country is the nations 4th highest peak.

Buddha foot

Depending on which legend you want to believe, Adams Peak is either;
     i) the place where Adam left his footprint after being kicked out of heaven,
     ii) the place where Buddha left an impression of his foot,
     iii) the place where Shiva left an impression of his foot or
     iv) Butterfly Mountain, where butterflies come to die.

The sacred 'footprint' in the rock is surrounded by a bland temple and a small shrine. Lower down is a charmless concrete assembly hall for the pilgrims to congregate in. The first thing I noticed was the massive amount of brilliantly coloured butterflies around the temple. Sadly though there were many more on the ground, either crushed underfoot or simply expired. After seeing this I felt more inclined to believe definition iv above. It was at the same time beautiful and tragic that these harmless creatures should come here to sacrifice themselves.

Reclining Buddha

Many pilgrims had made the trip up to the peak. Some where still hovering around the temple at the top but the majority of them had walked down already smiling at us as we made the ascent. They had made the trip up much earlier in the morning in the hope of watching the sunrise but there was no chance of that today. On the way down I took turns with Danielle and Greg counting the number of steps we had walked up - it came to 4,466. After a quick stretch we drove via Kandy for lunch further north to Dambulla for the start of the One Day Cricket series between Pakistan, New Zealand and the hosts Sri Lanka.