Haputale - Sri Lanka

Locations covered : Haputale, Idalgashinna
Trip dates : 21st and 22nd July 2012

It's been a while since I wrote on this blog. Having fled from the British winter as soon as possible, I'm currently back in Sri Lanka for the Christmas holidays. It's been only a few days doing nothing but catching up with the all the sleep I lost at uni, and I'm sort of bored already. So I thought of updating my travel blog with a couple of trips we had in Sri Lanka last July.

So our first trip was to Haputale, which is about 180 km away from Colombo in the hill country. Our plan was to spend a night at a holiday bungalow named "Blackwood View" in Haputale, and to visit a few places around. We started late in the afternoon from Colombo, and got to the bungalow about 5 - 6 hours later, after stopping at a couple of places along the A4 for food. The Blackwood bungalow is only about 3 km uphill from Beragala, perched on the steep slope on the right hand side of main road. It was completely dark when we reached Blackwood, and so we couldn't enjoy the breath-taking view that the owner said it had. Had to wait till morning to take a glimpse of the wonderful scenery, a landscape so serene for which I'm not going to bother finding adjectives. The pics below would explain it all.

It is said that that 5 out of the 9 provinces of Sri Lanka can be seen from the terrace of the bungalow. The images on the left were taken facing south, so panning from left to right in the view, one could see the Eastern, Uva, Southern, Sabaragamuwa and Western (if you squint, I think :P) provinces respectively. 

Unfortunately, it wasn't the clearest of days, but still, the Udawalawe reservoir was slightly visible from the bungalow. Yes, the Udawalawe reservoir from Haputale. It definitely was one the best panoramas I had  come across. The bungalow was also built at different levels, following the natural steep slope of the terrain, thereby giving glamorous views to almost all the windows.

Next, we visited the famous Adisham Bungalow, which was built by Sir Thomas Villiers in 1931. The house has been well preserved with all the furniture, paintings etc., and has been converted to a monastery by the Sylvestro-Benedictine congregation of the Roman Catholic church. 

See a couple of photos of the bungalow on the right. Unfortunately they didn't allow us to take any photos inside the bungalow. Later, we returned to the Blackwood bungalow after visiting the Haputale town. 

It was dark again when we got to Blackwood, but long-exposure shots couldn't keep the view away from me for long. See the pic below for a 30 second long shot, exposing quite a lot of details from the plains below. 

Although a lot of lights are visible in the photo above, we could only see about a handful of the brightest ones to our naked eyes. The bright white light on the left of the top image is actually the Mahinda Rajapakse International Cricket Stadium in Hambantota. The first ODI match of India's tour of Sri Lanka was going on at that time; a high-scoring match where India won by 21 runs. Ok so without getting carried away with the cricket, I should say that I was truly surprised to find out that the bright light was indeed the stadium, which was around 50 km away from the bungalow. Even more interesting were the bright orange glows visible behind the hills on the photos. After quite a few suggestions as to what they would be, we finally came to the conclusion that they were caused by forest fires on the other side of the hills. We knew that there were hundreds of hectares of forest being destroyed by the man-made fires in that area. Pity. 

The next morning we had a good hike uphill towards the Haputale town, while enjoying the wonderful view of the plains below. Afterwards, we visited Idalgashinna, which is a small town situated a good 500 meters (1600 ft) above the Haputale main road. Folklore has it that the area gained the name because of the coconut ekel-like (idal) trees (gas) that were present in the area. The winds from the southern plains blast their way through the summit of the mountain, causing most of the trees to shrivel and become bare and stick-like. Hence the name, they say. The views kept getting better and better as we made our way to the top of the mountain. Let the photos below do the talking.

We also visited the Idalgashinna railway station, which is one of the highest stations in Sri Lanka. The stations is also said to be one of the very special buildings where the rain water falling on to the two sides of the roof end up in two different rivers. Since the station is right at the summit, the water from the northern half of the roof flows northwards towards the Mahaweli river and meets the sea at Trincomalee, whereas the water from the southern side of the roof feeds the Walawe river and falls to the sea at Ambalanthota. Interesting thought really.

We had a small chat with a station master, and got permission to walk through one of the tunnels on the railway line, after making sure that there were no trains due for the next hour or so. First time I ever "walked" through a railway tunnel. Later, we took a different route to Haputale instead of returning the same way, and also continued the tour to Diyatalawa before returning back to the bungalow. And then it was the long, somewhat sad, journey back to Colombo. Back to real life. 

That's pretty much it from Haputale I guess. Catch you on my next post. Bye! :)