Ella and the Highlands

Ella is a small town wedged in a gap in the southern escarpment, and on a clear morning you can see all the way to the coast through it. It has become popular enough to have a main street of cafés, but the walking around it is still the point. Little Adam's Peak is an easy hour and rewards early risers with mist sitting in the valley below. Ella Rock is harder, less signposted, and quieter. The Nine Arch Bridge is a short walk through tea and jungle from town — check the train times before you go, because the bridge without a train on it is just a bridge. Horton Plains, an hour and a half north and much higher, is a different landscape again: montane grassland, frost some mornings, and World's End, where the plateau drops away nearly nine hundred metres. Go at dawn or the cloud closes in and you will see nothing at all.