WWW Highlands trip

WWW is a five-day school trip where students travel to different parts of Sri Lanka to explore some of the lesser-known areas of the country. The trip that I went on was the Highlands trip, where we went hiking around the central part of the country. We stayed at three different hotels/campsites during our trip, and all three of them were unique. We stayed at a campsite on the first night, the second and third nights we stayed at a monastery, and the last night we stayed at The Grand Hotel in Nuwara Eliya. By the end of the week we hiked 66.5 km total, which is around 13 km per day.

Day 1

I woke up around 5:15 AM on Monday morning because we were supposed to leave from school by 6:00. I had already packed the night before, and grabbed a quick snack before driving to school. I got to school around 5:50,  but we didn’t end up leaving until 6:30. We spent the entire morning in the car, only stopping for breakfast around 9:00 AM. Around 2:00 PM we arrived at our only hike for the day, which was a 2 km hike to a waterfall. There were two paths. One longer one that led to the waterfall that we went to first, and a much shorter walk to another waterfall. We had an opportunity to swim in a pool beneath the waterfall, and everyone chose to swim.

The water was freezing cold, and it took me around 15 minutes to adjust to the temperature. We spent around 30 minutes swimming, then walked back to the other waterfall and took a picture.

This waterfall (Bambarakanda Falls) is the tallest waterfall in Sri Lanka, it drops 263 meters into a pool. This makes it the 461st tallest waterfall in the world. After we took a picture, we got back on the bus to drive to our campsite. The bus dropped us off about 5 km from our campsite, and we walked the rest of the way. We didn’t walk along a trail, but instead we were following a back road that eventually merged back into the main road. When we reached the campsite, we unloaded our bags from the buses (who had driven straight to our destination) and moved them to our tents. After that we had dinner, which was a Sri Lankan dinner of rice and curry. We had time to journal after dinner, and then we headed to bed.

Day 2

We woke up around 6:30 AM, ate a quick breakfast of toast and eggs, then packed up our stuff and drove to Lipton’s Seat. Today’s hike was stage 13 of the Pekoe Trail, which we would be doing in reverse. The road got too narrow to take the buses, so we arranged tuks to take us the rest of the way up. It took us about an hour to get to the base of the mountain, and 20 minutes in a tuk to get to the top. There is a small restaurant next to a house that was built for Thomas Lipton (the person that Lipton’s Seat was named for, and also the founder of the Lipton tea company), and we had a snack there.

After we were finished, we started on our hike. We were hiking the trail in reverse so that we would be walking down the mountain, so our hike started by walking through the tea plantation. It started out very clear, but after about an hour it started to get very foggy. We hiked through a group of birch trees that were beautiful in the fog, and then we emerged back onto a trail overlooking the valley.

Soon after we left the stand of trees, it started raining. It rained for most of the rest of the hike, and it made the rest of the hike more difficult as a result. We hiked for about two hours downhill until the rain stopped for a few minutes, then stopped to eat lunch. The campsite that we had stayed at the night before had made sandwiches for us to bring, and they were very tasty. At this point the rest of the trail was all downhill along a dirt road, so we were past the hardest part. The rain started again soon after we started moving again, and it didn’t let up until after we made it back to the buses. The rest of the hike was uneventful, as we didn’t stop at any of the scenic vistas due to the rain obscuring the view. The trail exited out onto a road, and we followed the road to the train station where the buses were waiting for us.

We drove to the Adisham Monastery where we would be spending the next two nights and unpacked our belongings. By this time it was almost dinner time, so we met in the common room/dining area for dinner. We ate dinner (curry, rice, and papadam) then journaled before playing a few rounds of werewolf (mafia) before going upstairs to sleep.

Day 3

We woke up early again today, around 6 AM. Breakfast consisted of toast and yoghurt, and we left the monastery around 7:00 AM. Today’s plan was to take a train from Haputale to Ohiya, where we would hike Stage 12 of the Pekoe trail back to the monastery. The train was scheduled to leave at 7:40 AM, so we have to leave early to get to the station on time. The train ended up being about 10 minutes late, so we had plenty of time to take a picture there.

The train ride was about 30 minutes, and after we got off we took jeeps to the start of Stage 12. The start of the trail was very rugged,

(Credit to Ms. Kamila for the trail maps, and Ms. Kamila, Mr. Russo, and Mr. Wallace for the pictures)