For Geography class we have recently been going over our IA plan and organizing questions for our trip to Ella, staying in the Amba Estate. We had been planning questions to conduct interviews to have with people who live along and around the Pekoe Trails. For my IA I planned to look at the happiness index of local citizens around the following areas; Amba, Karandagolla, Pekoe Trails stage 14 and Pekoe Trails stage 15. Now having gone on the trip I have all my necessary data. Overall we conducted around 58 interviews across the 4 different location. Working with my partner Liam on the trip we worked well together with either an Amba assistant or Ms. Desline to translate all the questions we had to ask (49) into either Sinhala or Tamil to get answers. The whole trip lasted 3 nights from Tuesday afternoon to Friday from April 30th to May 3rd. Each day we were very active, out for most of the day walking or sight seeing. Some of the sights we saw were morning hill top views of mountain ranges, a natural pool that we swam in near the Amba estate and a cave that we went down . The cave had a super clear water source at the bottom, so clear it looked like air but blue. The cave we went down was by far the highlight of my trip as is was an adventure like no other I had been on, spooky but so cool. Anyways, on each day of the trip (aside from the day we left) we went to at least one location to conduct interviews. From this we got lots of steps in traveling many kilometers to different villages by foot. Having been across Ella to many villages and even being in houses to see what the experience of living there may be like, we got a good sense of what life is like in some of theses areas. Overall the Geography trip to Ella was a great success and provided me with new perspectives and experiences in my life.
