Carving a path through cloud-swathed villages and centuries-old tea estates, the new long-distance Pekoe Trail gives hikers a chance to explore Sri Lanka’s quiet central highlands.
When I reach Galaha in Sri Lanka’s central highlands, the sun is high in the sky and the streets are clouded with dust. Tuk-tuks rattle around women in red saris flecked with gold, narrowly missing the one-eyed dog sleeping in the road. Amid the honking and coconut selling, I hear a familiar sound — Beethoven’s Für Elise — moving closer, crackling from a tuk-tuk selling fish buns, and bringing with it the smell of freshly baked bread.
The footpath crosses the Deltotte Tea Estate, where rows of parakeet-green tea bushes — each exactly a metre apart and pruned to waist height — carpet the undulating hills. When we arrive, women are walking silently between the bushes, plucking young tea buds at lightning speed and depositing them into tarpaulin sacks. We accompany them to a weighing station, a wooden shelter where their sacks are hung from hooks to assess their morning’s work.
Becoming a guide when Sri Lanka had already lost the majority of its tourists seems like a risky career move, I say. As we cross into the Loolecondera tea estate, Ramli tells me he’s only guided a handful of guests all year, but he’s hopeful things will change. Focusing on small-scale, high-quality production, Amba pays its tea artisans up to six times more than the average tea plantation. Whereas a tea plucker’s working day usually ends at the weighing station, Amba’s staff are involved in the process from plant to cup, from drying and rolling to tasting and packaging.
The views are mesmerising. The morning mist clings to layers of forested hills. Below me, the tea fields are a sea of electric green, but in a valley to my right is a patch of virgin forest bursting with pockets of orange, yellow and red. We pass Hindu shrines and Buddhist temples draped in colourful silks. All around, the air ripples with the song of flycatchers; a serpent eagle perches on a nearby eucalyptus tree.
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