Sunday, Feb 16th, Nuwara Eliya, Sri Lanka

Greetings!

Another travel day, with a visit to the Royal Botanical Gardens in Peradeniya, a climb to 1800 meters to the Damro Tea factory, and the executive suite of the Blackpool Hotel.

The gardens are huge (127 acres), and its development includes a temple in 1371, several renowned superintendants in the 1800s, and its use by Lord Mountbatten as the headquarters in WWII for the South East Asia Command.  In making plans for the next few days, we have to take into consideration the fact that Pat and I are both limping.  Her knee and my foot are causing us to feel our age.  So we have cut back a bit on the hiking portions of our previously design itinerary.

However, we did decide not to utilize the golf carts and shuttle busses in the park, in favor of walking about half the pathways in order to take it all in.   As a result, I think we found a bonus that few not looking up would have seen.  A Crested Serpent Eagle sat just above a trail overlooking a lake.

Staff of the Damro Labookellie Tea Factory, the second oldest tea plantation on the island,  showed us how they produce green, white, and black tea ingredients for the auctions held in Columbo each year.  Tea brands from all over the world come to Sri Lanka to mix and match what the island grows, and what we all love to drink.

Sri Lanka is the fourth largest tea producer in the world (China, Inida, Kenya, and Sri Lanka), and the third largest exporter (Kenya exports less).  After water, the most widely used drink in the world, it comes from the Camelia family.

Finally, we climbed even higher on the mountain, and checked into the executive suite at the Blackpool Hotel.  This hotel gets low ratings for accessibility to other tourist locations (better own a car, and like driving winding hilly, narrow  roads), but it certainly worked for us.  Needing two days of rest, in a cooler mountain climate (with a heated pool), we plan on getting the most out of the best suite in the hotel.  And that's only half of the balcony!

To see all of the photos taken today, click on Sunday, Feb 16th, Nuwara Eliya, Sri Lanka.